Arco Event - in Factum Arte, Madrid, ESP, 2023

INSIDE OUT – WHITE MOUNTAINS
Madrid, February 24nd - 26nd 2023

In collaboration with Adam Lowe and the Factum Arte team, Bernd Nicolaisen reinterpreted the 8x10 inch black and white negative in Gesso Aluminium prints and an 3D Alabaster and black ink. The inversion of the tonal values can also stand for itself and does so quite consciously in this series. Removed from reality by at least one degree, the images from Inside Out - White Mountains open up new worlds and other times.

Man is facing great upheavals. We are fundamentally changing the world around us and are developing such a transfor- mative power that we have even founded a new age: the Anthropocene. The world of images is also changing significant- ly and extremely rapidly. Here we are at the end of an analogue and material era, where images came out of the box, and are now entering a digital and immaterial era, where our images are calculated by some kind of mirror with a capture button. Bernd Nicolaisen accompanies both upheavals in his photographs. With great curiosity, he uses the camera to look for places in this world that manifest themselves in geological time dimensions, where people and their development become almost invisible in fast motion. In a way, all that‘s left is a before and an after. This shows how indifferent our planet and the universe is to our existence. However, what we do with this opportunity is in our hands.

Between 2005 and 2009 Bernd Nicolaisen photographed 4000 year old mountain pines in the remote mountains of the Sierra Nevada with a plate camera on 8x10 inch black and white negative film. The tedious hike with heavy luggage to the hard-to-find trees in the White Mountains and the extensive photographic work on site were part of the process. It has something meditative and awe-inspiring, yes, also quite performative. This is not about topicality and not about the decisive moment in the sense of Henri Cartier Bresson. Bernd Nicolaisen is looking for enduring traces - traces that were there long before him and will be there long after him.

The black markings that criss-cross the ancient wood of the pine trees are proof that time and probability are relative terms: every tree here has been struck by lightning at least once in its lifetime. In terms of human lifetimes or even photographic exposure times, this is almost unimaginable. And yet it is exactly what Bernd Nicolaisen manages to make representable in the picture by folding the two time levels together.

More than ten years have passed since Nicolaisen took photographs in the Sierra Nevada. He also takes photos with a digital camera back. But in this moment of paradigm shift and our changing image culture, he has thought about his earlier work again: in a kind of homage to the analogue process in general and film in particular, he has taken out the negatives again and as such in a new series, Inside Out (2021), reconsidered in today‘s context.

The wood and its drawing appear different in the negative, alienated. A trained eye can “read” and “translate” this representation. And yet the reversal of the tonal values can also stand as something of its own and in this series it does so quite consciously. light trails. The image almost glows from within. Where comparatively little light hit the film, most of the light now penetrates and paints a different picture. The lightest spots often indicate where lightning used to make its way through the wood or where it burned. You can read that allegorically, or simply let yourself be fascinated and enticed by the structures in their abstraction. Daniel Blochwitz

Group Exhibition with Rachid Karaïchi, Boris Savalev, Adam Fuss, Marina Cook, Clark Winter.

To see more about the project watch the documentary „Inside Out - White Mountains“ with Adam Lowe.
Film by Cédric Marville