Impossible Horizon – exhibition

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 (…).

Photos: Julia Pietrzak, Instytut Fotografii Fort, 2024