Impossible Horizon

The intermedia exhibition by duo Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko consists of a series of photographs, unique photographic objects, a sound installation, and video works, realized over the past years as part of Artist-in-Residence programs in Norway, Greece, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Spain and Portugal. The unifying theme binding of all the works is the curving perception of the natural landscape and questions about the shifting boundaries between the domains of nature and technology.

Our relationship with landscapes is intricate and contradictory. We yearn for contact with pristine, untouched nature, yet we cannot resist the temptation to alter what we encounter. Captain James Cook reportedly established English-style gardens (thus, gardens imitating wild nature) on every island he reached in the South Pacific during his late 18th-century voyages. While encountering genuinely untouched areas, he sought to make them even more “natural,” but in accordance with his own beliefs about how nature should appear.

Even today, in the era of photographic overproduction, we experience landscapes in a mediated manner. We always see only what we believe (to quote the title of Errol Morris’s excellent book on photography). In “The Impossible Horizon,” Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko reveal the most surprising paradox of the landscape: the fact that the landscape as such does not exist. What exists are vantage points. The landscape is essentially a two-dimensional representation of what exists in the three-dimensional world. When we think of the Grand Canyon, the Iguazu Falls, the fjords of Norway, or the ergs of the Sahara, our memory inevitably recalls specific photographs taken from specific places at specific times.

Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko engage in a game with the concept of the landscape, addressing its various aspects. Their starting point is the words of Polish logician Alfred Korzybski: the map is not the territory. Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map.” The Empire from the story “On Exactitude in Science” was, of course, fictional. However, the satellite images in Google Maps are not fictional – they seem to increasingly accurately overlap with the territory, but they offer an experience of the landscape in a fragmented, discontinuous, and structureless manner. Discontinuity, interruption of coherence, and deconstruction of structure are also what the Doroszenko duo accomplishes in their collages, objects, installations, and digital renders. The aesthetics of glitch and generative imperfection are inscribed in the long tradition of thinking about the landscape as a phantasm, for which the organizational categories are sublimity and picturesque, which still shape our expectations and imaginings of engaging with nature.

Using popular computer games, travel guides and other online sources, the artists reveal the dream of relaxing in an idyllic landscape, which is very common in the digital age. They look at a variety of landscapes based not only on visual aspects of reality, but equally the artists explore the usually overlooked sound environment. In the films presented at the exhibition, Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko use field recordings as the basis for polyphonic sound compositions, and introduce a performative action that allows them to use the qualities of natural landscapes as systems of musical notation. In the sound installation, they present ways of musically reading the rhythmics of the reduced sound environment through the excitation and preparation of synthetic materials.