The exhibition combines works from a wide range of media, from video, to sculpture to works on canvas and works on paper, that draw from the artists own research trip to Greenland and material of a collaboration with the marine scientists Alex Rogers at the Oxford University who gave Neudecker access 16 TB to footage of a project to map a mountain range under the deep sea. This footage was filmed by cameras mounted to a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in the Southwest Indian Ocean. As the cameras slowly scan the ground, moving along, close to the seabed, lights cast cones of light into the dark vastness and reveals human detritus, such as abandoned fishing equipment.
On dog sled journeys in Greenland, Mariele Neudecker spent weeks taking photographs and video of Inuit life, the ice and the arctic sky, with everything from cutting edge digital cameras to a biscuit-tin pinhole camera, anticipating the charge in batteries to run out, in absence of any possibility to ‘re-charge’ for several days. This, intentionally, resembled a journey through the history of photography, in reverse.
Each environment – sea, ice sheet and atmosphere – is both isolated form and intricately intertwined with the rest, not least in terms of the effects of human activity.
Mapping, scanning and cropping are devices that inform the conceptual layers of Neudecker‘s work. An iceberg has been used by the artist as a deliberate cliché and is represented at the centre of the exhibition as a finely crafted sculpture of a section of a specific iceberg, a slice, which relates to human dimensions, the measurements of an average doorframe. Neudecker is interested in what is unseen as much as what is visible here.
The deliberate cropping of the iceberg is also applied in the video work Dark Years Away, which depicts the footage of the deep sea that never allows an overview. This time the image is cropped by the limits of the remotely controlled camera. Neudecker has edited the film of a scooping net attached to the ROV to retrieve samples into an endless loop, cinematically animated with a classical score by Peteris Vasks called Voices of Silence, a piece that was originally composed for the silence in outer space.
The new body of 2-D work, including Between Two Tides, a large group of drawings, paintings, pinhole and polaroid images and over-painted photographs, add a very subjectively haptic aspect to the otherwise more technological scientific approach in the exhibition. This personal journal of drawing and painting studies becomes a metaphor for the mental journey and depicts the memorized horizons of the artists voyage to the Arctic North.
Neudecker creates dense atmospheres that come close to a sense of the sublime, which is immediately deconstructed and ironically connected to mankind‘s power in and over nature, a power that is so pronounced that we can no longer endorse a belief that nature is even a valid concept.
Gretel Ehrlich is an American travel writer who joined the first part of the Greenland expedition, and was instrumental in connecting Neudecker to the local hunters in Qaanaaq.
The deep-sea work was developed with – and facilitated by Professor Alex Rogers, Oxford University and was curated and commissioned Alice Sharp of Invisible Dust. Both projects have been funded by Bath Spa University, Arts Council England and HOUSE Festival in Brighton.
The sculpture There is Always Something More Important was produced with the support of the ALTANA Kulturstiftung gGmbH in Bad Homburg, HOUSE Festival, Galerie Barbara Thumm and Galerie Thomas Rehbein, Cologne.
