IMPOSSIBLE IMAGE
2015

Installation, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Commission for the 2015 biennale Disappearing Acts, Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in Lofoten, Norway.

What happens to our experience of the sublime in an age of increasing awareness of human impacts upon the planet? How are the scales of geological and human time reconcilable within the technologies of a single image?

Anna Ådahl´s work for Disappearing Acts develops from these questions questions in an installation that is comprised of sculptural, video, and performance elements.

Impossible Image involves three kinds of imagery. Firstly, landscapes sourced through an online search, which have been superimposed on top of each other creating one image.

Secondly, a microscopique live fed image of locally collected sand, from a beach in Lofoten. The sand is also physically present in the installation. Thirdly, images that relate to landscape artists who have visualised the Lofoten Islands during the turbulences of the first half of the twentieth century. These three ”channels” of imagery refer to different image circulations and their inherent technologies, but they also refer to the historical scales that variously implicate our spectatorship (the sand encompassing all the micro elements of Lofoten´s scenery). During the period of the exhibition, a number of performers will occasionally interact with the installation, further reinforcing a sense of how the human figure is contingently placed within the scales of ecological and technological time.

”How we loved to feel small when encompassed by the magnificent forces of the Niagara Falls or the stunning immensity of the Arctic glaciers or the desolate and desiccated landscape of the Sahara. What a delicious thrill to set our size alongside that of galaxies! Small compared to Nature but, as far as morality is concerned, so much bigger than even Her grandest display of power! So many poems, so many meditations about the lack of commensurability between the everlasting forces of nature and the puny little humans claiming to know or to dominate Her. So one could say, after all, that the disconnect has always been there and that it is the inner spring of the feeling for the sublime.”

“The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now, reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings”
But what has become of the sublime lately, now that we are invited to consider another disconnect, this time between, on one side, our gigantic actions as humans, I mean as collected humans, and, on the other side, our complete lack of a grasp on what we have collectively done?”

Extract from — Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics*

A lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011 for the launching of SPEAP (the Sciences Po program in arts & politics) Bruno Latour, Science Po.