Klik hier voor Nederlands
How is time challenging the landscape? Hagar Schuringa’s (1996) practice focuses on the continuous movement of the landscape. She is fascinated by the notion that mountains, islands, or fjords may seem rock-solid, but are actually constantly on the move. In her work she searches for the traces time has left on our natural surroundings, and explores how we deal with these. Existing visual material forms the point of departure for installations that combine silkscreen prints, photographs, and drawings. The same applies to her new work for Prospects. At a flea market, Schuringa found a series of 1940s picture postcards of the Mont Blanc massif. She wondered how this area had changed since then. Last summer she therefore visited the glaciers Mer de Glace, Miage, and Glacier des Bossons, which all turned out to have substantially decreased in size. With her camera she captured the new situation and combined these images with details from archival material to create silkscreen prints and drawings. A new landscape is thus able to emerge from something that is disappearing.
Tourism and the climate crisis have accelerated changes over the past few decades. Yet, change has always occurred, even though it is often not immediately obvious. Only when one returns to a place at a later time does the difference become apparent. In her work at Prospects, Schuringa explores this concept of transitional time: unseen moments of movement in the landscape. This ‘transitional time’ is also embedded in her artworks: amidst all the fragmented images, time seems to be constantly slipping away.
Text: Esmee Postma
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)