Hoogland Ivanow’s exhibition consists of selected fragments from her ongoing work on a feature-length documentary entitled Second Nature, which follows a group of individuals who dream of a communal existence in nature, drawing inspiration from hunters and gatherers. It serves as a contemporary documentation that illuminates our propensity for irrationality and our search for meaning in these challenging times.
We are pleased to start the autumn season with Martina Hoogland Ivanow’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. The show’s title is borrowed from Barbro Hörberg’s song from 1973, Med Ögon Känsliga för Grönt (With Eyes Sensitive for Green), which carries a different symbolism today. Our relationship with nature has become political and intertwined with identity politics in many ways, where an interest or commitment to nature can be seen as an ideological stance. Hoogland Ivanow’s exhibition consists of selected fragments from her ongoing work on a feature-length documentary entitled Second Nature, which follows a group of individuals who dream of a communal existence in nature, drawing inspiration from hunters and gatherers. It serves as a contemporary documentation that illuminates our propensity for irrationality and our search for meaning in these challenging times. What has become evident to Hoogland Ivanow during the film’s production is that the challenge perhaps lies not solely in Western society’s ignorance of nature in terms of practical knowledge or conveniences but rather in individualism and a lack of willingness to collaborate, as well as the unwillingness to give up certain privileges. The exhibition underscores the importance of reflecting on one another and our aspirations, where nature assumes a secondary role. This might be where the difficulty of the overall transition lies. For Hoogland Ivanow, the film serves as a mirror reflecting the paradoxes of human behavior and the disorientation that characterizes our times, conveying these complexities through an interpretation that blends humor, absurdity, and evocative imagery.
When we go home, the forest remains. When we disappear, everything starts to grow over.
A text written by Jonatan Habib Engqvist. Download pressrelease for original version in Swedish.
The world is utterly unacceptable. And by that, I don't just mean how we, the human apes, behave. Nature is not just meaningless and absurd – it's dreadful. Ruthless. And it's going to get worse. 'See how repulsive this nature is,' Schopenhauer writes. 'However, it is in the lives of animals, easy to overlook, that one most readily apprehends the futility and egoism in the toil of the whole phenomenon. The diversity of structure, the perfection in the ways each of the species has adapted to its environment and its prey, stands here in stark contrast to the absence of any defensible purpose. In place of this purpose, a moment of fleeting pleasure, the condition for which is want, many and prolonged sufferings, an unceasing struggle, bellum ominium, each at once hunter and hunted, chaos, loss, misery and fear, cries and roars, that is what one sees; and so it will continue, in secula seculorum, or until the planet's crust cracks once again.[1]
For some reason, I am thinking of Jacob Riis, who worked for social reforms through photography in the early 1900s. He wrote that it was once said that one half of the world doesn't know how the other half lives, and it was true back then. It didn't know because it didn't care to know. The half that was at the top cared little for the struggle, and less for the fate of those below, as long as it could keep them in place and maintain its own position. I wonder: What difference does awareness make? Even though Schopenhauer's idea of existence being desire and life force, of the world as a picture of itself and 'as such capable of aesthetic transformation,' is largely crushed by the contemporary monotonous streams of images. By the 'logic of the supermarket' [2] prevalent in modern liberalism – is there still something to be gained from the notion of an organic force and a representation corrupted by both sensory impressions and learned habits?
What "nature" does the group of people in Martina Hoogland Ivanow's sound piece refer to when they say they're going to learn from it and return to it? Do they even know themselves? – "What is this?" one of the members even frustratedly asks as the storm outside grows stronger. Human nature, the nature human? Human-animal? Who is she? The Lord of the Flies? I suspect that the Latin phrase bellum ominium, the war of all against all, in the Schopenhauer quote above is a nod to Thomas Hobbes, who succinctly argued that humans were self-loving beings driven by their own interests.Thus, the human state of nature was precisely this; the law of the jungle, Bellum omnium contra omnes, without governance or order. How was it again? Desire is the root of all suffering? Albert Einstein's "look at nature, and then you will understand everything better" is, in fact, a relatively ambivalent phrase.
Perhaps I'm thinking of Riis because photography is so central to most of what Hoogland Ivanow does. And because she has long used photography to investigate human behavior, how we interact with each other, and how the self relates to the world. She employs thermal cameras and animations, but above all, the photographic process emerges here as negation.
The exhibition space itself is like a sort of inverted darkroom where the red light is replaced with a green one, and the image development takes place in the opposite direction. Instead of allowing visible negative or positive images to appear on an exposed photographic film and then transferring them onto an emulsion-coated surface – the images dissolve into moving projections of decaying, fragmented nitrate films exposed to filtered daylight and mixed with the sound of a Mellotron and recorded buzzing bumble bees... perhaps in this gesture lies a conscious effort to avoid typifying the nature imagery, to create a dialogue, to engage with and record surroundings through image gestures rather than documenting or conquering them from the 'outside.'
The green glass pane, writes Wittgenstein, diminishes the differences between light and dark. And if the green glass pane makes the things behind it green, then it makes white turn green, red turn black, yellow turn yellow-green, blue turn green-blue. What happens when the white cube is consistently filtered through green? Concerning a green glass pane, one could say that it imparts its color to the objects. But does the "white" pane do that? If the green medium imparts its color to the objects, it is primarily to the white. [3]
However, it was only fairly recently, perhaps in the middle or end of the 19th century, that urban poetry and art, as with modernism, increasingly began to relate to the white space, became possible – and I think that it's also in relation to the formation of urban aesthetic sensibility that the contemporary idea of "nature" arises. That is, the type of nature the group intends to return to. Or rather; a conception of nature developed in parallel with science and the medium that, so to speak, documents and thus will shape it – photography. Or shall we say; perhaps it's only with photography that nature is given a value that exceeds its existence as an economic or factual resource; and its ephemeral beauty can be preserved, mediated, and eventually capitalized upon, as potentia. For example, the Grand Canyon was essentially worthless land until it could be photographed, turned into imagery and a projection surface for the idea of freedom, emancipation – a wild or raw nature – and thus could be tamed, and also become both a tourist destination and a symbol of nation-building. A place to which people pilgrimage to take a photograph of the image they've already seen – and nature becomes a sort of representation of the world, as stage and scenery and the experience as a product.
In the film Second Nature, which serves as the work-in-progress basis for this exhibition, Hoogland Ivanow follows a group of human-animals attempting to live in the forest in a manner inspired by (a notion of) hunter-gatherer culture. It's an idea of a culture before culture, where the participants aim to "return" through their constructed existence, uncover forgotten knowledge through entrails, bird whispers, and thereby learn to survive the impending apocalypse. The audio track for the exhibition has been drawn from the ongoing process of creating the documentary film. In the filmed scene, the human group sits in a sort of hut or tipi, discussing the lack of engagement within the group while a storm gathers strength outside. Eventually, the wind makes it difficult to hear what is being said, but the discussion persists. Nature should not hinder the discourse on how to best become a part of it! In this way, the audio track in this exhibition becomes a central puzzle piece in a sort of spatialization of the climate unrest and conflicting emotional states present in society at large. The world is not seen through rose-colored glasses, but rather through green-tinted ones.
Perhaps even this constructed environment is a way to approach ecological issues without separating oneself from the environment, nature, and so to speak, avoiding anthropocen-centrism by emphasizing it. To photograph is to hold one's breath. There is solace in that, after all. Despite everything, the world is a widespread suffering.
[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, Addition to The World as Will and Representation, Chapter XXVIII, 1819. Translation by Kennet Klemets.
[2] Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, 2017. Translation by Kennet Klemets.
[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour (§184, §185, §191), 1977. Translation by Daniel Birnbaum. In this context, however, both the "green" and the "white" can be understood in a broader, metaphorical, and societal sense. In other words, the political polarization around what is commonly referred to as green may have existed for a longer time but today might be considered an even more privileged position due to its capitalization.
