2000 pounds of light

The room is divided in two, and the division runs not between two subjects but between two relationships to light.

Björn Drenkwitz needs the sun. His cyanotypes are made from nothing but sunlight and water, exactly the two forces whose shifting killed the trees they show. Past and Future Forest, since 2022: dead trees from European forests, lost to drought, fire, windthrow and bark beetle. Not a likeness but an imprint; a unique piece that has touched its subject. The sheets are 240 cm wide, their length follows the tree. They do not hang on the wall; they fall from it and run out across the floor.

Mathias Kessler replaced the sun. In 2007 he had some 2,000 pounds (one ton) of equipment flown to the west coast of Greenland and photographed at the Jakobshavn glacier near Ilulissat: at night, with motion-picture lights, the iceberg lit like a set. The result is a blazing body against absolute black, at a sharpness that meets the classical demands on the perfect landscape and thereby reveals them as staging.

Kessler’s wall is covered entirely in ice: a tight crop from the flank of an iceberg, printed as wallpaper at 560 × 240 cm, with no horizon, no water, no silhouette. On it hangs a single work, Ilulissat 011_3. It is the only place in the room where the ice is still an image.

Two ways of making face each other: sun against floodlight, imprint against rendering, unique piece against endless repeat. With Drenkwitz the format follows the object, with Kessler the building. And both works are part of what they speak about. Drenkwitz needs the light that burned his trees. Kessler burned fuel to light ice that melts because fuel is burned. The question that carries the dialogue: can an image bear witness to a loss it is itself part of?

Because the two works hang opposite each other, you never see both at once. The dialogue happens as you turn around.