Territorial Drift

Territorial Drift is all about connections between site, memory and history. Six artists explore places where personal and political stories lie hidden like layers of the earth. They share a fascination for dissecting changing landscapes: ruins, mines, jungles. Travel plays an important role in their work, which converges science with imagination in different ways. From drawings to video, and from actual research to autonomous interpretation.

Otobong Nkanga disentangles the shadow side of the grandeur of natural treasures. She visits the former copper mine in Tsumeb, Namibia: a site that once promised prosperity, now an abandoned crater. Pieter Paul Pothoven studies the raw materials that served as pigment for paintings in the seventeenth century. His overlapping slide projections form an abstract landscape with their geological and art-historical references.

The modest work of Irene Kopelman is a combination of clinical observation and an almost spiritual reverence for nature. Her colour studies are an attempt to make an inventory of the infinite number of shades of green from the jungles of Malaysia. After earlier visits to caves and bunkers, Chaim van Luit currently focusses on his own body: with the help of a formula he maps out his skin with all its scars.

Adam Helms reorganises images obtained from the media and archives. His composition of photos and illustrations contrasts our romantic ideas of explorers with the imperialistic past of the West. Ben Russell also has his own way of interpreting historic facts. On the Pacific island of Tanna, he is studying the cult around John Frum, a mysterious messiah, thereby playing with the conventions of anthropological films.