Navigating Polarities

Solo Catalog

Catalog with documentation of the solo exhibition ‘Navigating Polarities’

With essays:
The Layered Generosity of Marjolijn Dijkman – Karen Verschooren
Beyond Polar Thinking – Amelia Wallin
Reclaiming Vision: A Neo-Neo-Zoological Drama –  Jon Bywater

About the exhibition:

Marjolijn Dijkman’s artworks operate as speculative fictions rooted in scientific reality. Exploring perception and worldviews through the lens of diverse fields of thought, the artist asks: How can shifting between the macroscopic and the microscopic help us to imagine complex systems that are otherwise hard to grasp?

The immersive video installation Navigating Polarities (2018) spans the cosmic to the cellular, from the forcefields of the universe to the balance – or imbalance – between mind and body, humanity and ecology. Projected on a dome-shaped screen, like the concave of the globe, combinations of historical materials related to physics, navigation and astronomy summon philosophical speculations into the future directions of life in the Anthropocene.

Reclaiming Vision (2018), a film made in collaboration with Toril Johannessen, focuses on aquatic life forms that are invisible to the eye but that have been affected by human activity. The artists place microorganisms and pollutants from Norwegian fjords under the microscope in choreographed sequences, blurring the boundary between nature documentary and fiction.

A series of photographic prints in heightened colors, composed from the film’s raw footage and titled Aberrations (2018) – a biological term for defect or deviation from the norm – zooms in on the timely concern of global marine pollution.

Navigating Polarities measures the blind spots of anthropocentric perspectives alongside – in underwater filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s words – “the mysteries and miracles of nature.”

____

Navigating Polarities

Online pdf of the exhibition ‘Navigating Polarities’
NOME Gallery in Berlin, 2018
Editing: Hannah Gregory
Graphic design: Matteo Barbeni
Writers: Jon Bywater, Karen Verschooren, Amelia Wallin
Artists: Marjolijn Dijkman (in collaboration with Toril Johannessen)
Produced by NOME
Design: 515 Creative Shop
Thanks to: Nino Caltabiano, Torsten Oetken, Marie Couelle