Shadowland

Shadowland, 2023, installation: two video projections and an audio piece in a dark room with a dividing wall, variable size. Produced in collaboration with Per Bak Jensen.

Shadowland is a video installation devised in collaboration with the photographer Per Bak Jensen. It consists of two videos projected onto two facing walls in a dark room divided by a wall. One of the projections shows looping footage of shadows of leaves and branches which moving softly and slowly in the wind form abstract patterns that could be taken for transforming country borders. The other projection shows an inverted copy of the same footage. The visual experience is supplemented with an audio piece based on sounds of branches and leaves in the wind. 

Shadowland is an artistic spatial illustration of the camera obscura effect. It is an artistic attempt to create an experience of this principle, which is perceived as the basic technique of photography. Camera obscura consists of a dark room (or a box) with a small light opening in the middle of one of the sidewalls. This pinhole allows a beam of light to penetrate the dark room, refract, and create a true-to-life representation of a motif from outside the room when hitting the surface of the facing wall. Due to the principle of refraction, the ‘dark’ copy of the original motif from outside, is shown upside down – both vertically and horizontally.

In the video installation the observer is confronted with two images mimicking the outsider and insider perspectives to the subject matter, and the idea of two parallel realities – one familiar to us and one strangely distorted.

The art historian Rune Gade describes Shadowland as “a dark gaze into a light-filled darkness (…) a mourning dress that suddenly makes the world incomprehensible and disturbing. A look into all the ‘nothingness’ that can grip one with horror and fill one with deep sorrow. It’s about war.”