Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács - All, or Nothing at All

AKINCI is proud to present new work by the artist duo Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen. After their exhibition revolving around the theme of the primaeval forest ‘Białowieża’ in FOAM Photography Museum 2018/19, the artist duo recently produced another photogrammetric digital animation, this time built on the past and future ruins of the Danish City Viborg.

In this exhibition one can see the latest developments in the works of Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen, exploring the hybridity, in image and sound, of the ultra-thin surface of digital photography in order to contemplate its role in shaping our experience and memory. Using the figure of the digital ruin in a game-like environment, the artists show the glitches and hollowness behind and between the sequential images. The artists, in between the striking beauty of the images and sound, show the viewer how photographs no longer count as documentation of the past but are an overpowering part of everyday reality, something to touch and interact with, but also something fluid, like water, mirroring something like a reality that we never seem to be able to grasp, to penetrate or hold on to.

The film ‘All, or Nothing at All’ starts with an aerial view of Viborg, Denmark, one of the oldest Viking settlements that grew into a medieval city. Viborg looks like an idyllic city, with brick buildings surrounded by water and red-tiled roofs. This soon falls apart into an uncanny, post-apocalyptic diorama in which the urban landscape has been shredded. Seven avatars sing and dance the viewer through the abandoned shopping streets, garages, the old crusader paths and centuries old alleys of Viborg while they sing ‘All, or Nothing at All’, originally sung by Frank Sinatra and re-interpreted by Danish singer Nina Vadshølt. Composed by Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence in 1939, ‘All, or Nothing at All’ became Frank Sinatra’s first hitsong in the same year. While Sinatra interpreted it from an ut-terly male perspective, Nina Vadshølt transformed the song into an angelic, rebellious chant in which many voices converge and dispute each other.

The choreography is based on the musical West Side Story (1961), the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in New York, in which Polish/American and Puerto Rican street gangs fight each other. This choreography was performed in the flesh by dancer Daniel Cilea, motion-captured and then grafted onto the avatar-singers. As everything that seems feasible that appears on our screens, the ancient town of Viborg appears as a phantom vision. It is a polari-zed world in which there is no middle ground; it is everything or nothing.

The film ‘Forest on Location’, from the ‘Point Cloud, Old Growth’ exhibition, was made from footage shot in Eu-rope’s last remaining primaeval forest ‘Białowieża’. This 11,800 year-old ecosystem, located in the border region between Poland and Belarus, has been a wellspring of European imagination for centuries, forming the backdrop for legends, myths and fairytales. Throughout its history the forest has been assigned various roles: from a cultural and historical construct to a fought-over economic resource and a political hot potato. Despite its status as UNESCO World Heritage Site, its continued existence was threatened by extensive logging.

Lukács & Broersen created a digital ‘back-up’ of the disappearing forest, converting two-dimensional photographic documentation into a three-dimensional environment. This virtual forest forms the backdrop for the performance of Shahram Yazdani, an Iranian opera singer currently living in Berlin. He has created a Persian interpretation of Nat King Cole’s 1948 hit song ‘Nature Boy’. The melody of this song, originally by Eden Ahbez, a “Naturmensch” who was inspired by the Wandervogel movement, was later claimed by Herman Yablokoff, a Yiddish Broadway thea-tre composer, originating from a small town close to Bialowieza Forest. Shahram Yazdani re-wrote and recreated ’Nature Boy’, with Persian lyrics. In his version a wise tree is talking to a wandering lost boy, as an antithesis to the often imperial relation with nature in the Western culture. The overwhelmingly magical and picturesque world one enters in the beginning of the film, is slowly deconstructed in layered, fragmented parts of their digital representation.

Combined and complemented with a brand new short animation and lightboxes, ‘All, or Nothing at All’ is a dream-like and at the same time eye-opening exhibition, asking questions about perception, climate-change and virtual worlds.Lukács (1973, Amsterdam) & Broersen (1974, Delft) studied at the Sandberg Institute and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Their first large international solo show ‘Point Cloud, Old Growth’ opened in November 2018 at the FOAM Photography Museum in Amsterdam. A solo show in the Danish city Viborg followed. In 2019, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin organised a screening of ‘Forest on Location’ in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (Germany), with a live performance of Shahram Yazdani. Lukács & Broersen’s films, installations and graphic work have been shown internationally, at a.o. Rencontres Arles (France), Art Wuzhen (China), Castle Oud – Rekem (Bel-gium), Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (the Netherlands), MUHKA (Belgium), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Shanghai World Expo, Kröller Müller (the Netherlands) and Casa Enscendida (Madrid). Their films have been shown at several festivals including LAForum (Los Angeles), Oberhausen FilmFest (Germany), Kassel Dokumentar und Filmfestival (Germany), Rencontres Paris Berlin at Louvre, Paris (France), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (Germany), the New York Film Festival (United States), International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (The Netherlands). The film ‘Establishing Eden’ was nominated for the IFFR Tiger Awards 2016. In 2015, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam acquired the site-specific work ‘Ruins in Reverse’ (2015), especially made for the museum’s escalator. A public commission for the Noord Zuid Lijn Amsterdam led to a new work for the subway station in Amsterdam – Noorderpark: De Poorten van Noord.