Troika, Borrowed Light, 2020

2020

Medium

Perspex, photographic film

Dimensions

90 × 70 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-156045

In Borrowed Light (2020), photographic film strips, previously exposed to a colored laser, are diagonally fixed to the front and back of an acrylic plate within a transparent acrylic box. In the plate’s center, two exposed film strips of different color gradients overlap, intensifying their effect. The series Borrowed Light is a further development of the installation of the same name, exhibited at the Barbican, London in 2019 and in which a slowly moving film strip mirrored a steady sunrise and sunset. From both sides, a flow of intense color fields emerges, comparable to abstract photography. The work is reminiscent of a sunrise or sunset, with the entire color spectrum representing this natural phenomenon. The sunset is one of the most frequently recorded and reproduced photographic motifs, revealing the attempt to digitally capture a profoundly ephemeral event. Troika combines analogue and digital techniques in their production processes, in order to work with intangible and ephemeral media such as light; to shape their reception as something malleable rather than absolute. The artists expand the two-dimensional image onto a three-dimensional object and explore how technology is changing the human relationship to reality and how the digital world is increasingly extending into the physical world. The title refers to the principle of the borrowed landscape "Borrowed Scenery" in Japanese garden architecture, in which the background landscape is included in the composition of the garden.