Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Liminal Lands
21st May to 16th July, 2023
Outernet Arts
The Now Building
Charing Cross Road
London
Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen will be presenting Liminal Lands in a new multi-channel format across the world’s largest wrap-around screens for Outernet Arts on Tottenham Court Road. The installation will be free and accessible to the public, running every Sunday between 12:00 – 18:00 from 21st May to 16th July, 2023.
Liminal Lands evokes a transitional zone where fundamental energies of sun, salt, wind, water and bacteria collide in a hybrid reality. Gathered during over a year of fieldwork in the salt marshes of southern France, Steensen digitised and revived these real photographic elements into a synchronised 3D composition that highlights the otherwise unseen macro- and microscopic ecosystems of the wetlands.
Liminal Lands is a continuation of Steensen’s artistic practices of slow media and deep listening. The rhythm and attention to detail in the artwork reveals life-shaping transformations, invisible to the naked eye. The video begins slowly and rhythmically, leading the viewer away from the human realm into a plant, animal, and bacterial metamorphosis of life and technology.
Scales are manipulated, stretched and expanded, showing each micro-landscape of the wetlands from a changed perspective. A spatial sound system reveals an artistic curation of natural recorded material from the local landscape.
Every sound, form and texture in Liminal Lands has been digitised from the salt marshes of Salin de Giraud, in the Camargue region of the south of France. By recreating this very real, yet very remote setting in the context of the virtual, visitors can explore the evolution of the landscape’s biodiversity across human and geological time scales. The 3D reconstructive technology becomes a sensory tool for a new, ritualistic environmental experience.
Liminal Lands is one of a trilogy of Steensen’s immersive artworks focusing on wetlands and their forgotten natural histories. Wetlands cover 1% of the planet’s surface, but they account for 10% of all biodiversity. They are at the cradle of human life, as wetlands function as filters creating sustainable sources of freshwater. Liminal Lands brings a new, slow sensibility to these otherwise overlooked environments, encouraging visitors to re-examine their relationship to the ecosystems beneath their feet.
Originally commissioned by Luma Arles for the ‘Prelude Exhibition, 2021, Liminal Lands has also been shown at Nahmad Contemporary, Kornhausforum Bern, Reference Studios x Selfridges, Today Art Museum Beijing, SODA Gallery Manchester, as well as the BFI London Film Festival, Geneva International Film Festival, South By Southwest, Sonar Festival and VRHAM Hamburg. Liminal Lands is also being prepared for online distribution.
©2023 Jakob Kudsk Steensen
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