The Fall out (2023) Photographic Print on Japanese Kozo paper, photograph as etching, handmade book cover, wooden support structure
122 cm x 200 cm (h)

The waterfall symbolises a sense of letting go, of cleansing and continuous flow of life. It rains water in cascades as rivers flow over resistant bedrock, falling off steep drops, creating a microclimate that is still not well understood. They have often been considered the first ‘tourist’ sites, the first photographed landscapes, such as Niagara Falls or Victoria Falls- named after colonial visitors, their indigenous names often overlooked. Here the disappearance of the Guairá Falls is depicted. They have now disappeared, only a distant memory. Explosives were used to blow them up by the Brazilian military in the 1980s to make way for the Itaipú dam- the largest in the world until the Three Gorges Dam in China was built many years later. The Guairá Falls were once one of the wonders of the natural world but are now part of the oral and visual history of the place. This large-scale photographic piece imperfectly records and translates a found image of the falls, becoming a faded version, abstracted in inks, pixels and chemicals. Like our own memories, the grey tones act to prompt recollections, and are given agency only in the hidden stories they can tell. The language of memory and photography is so intertwined that the textures of these tones remind us only of what is absent.

These Structures can be articulated and free standing or leant/placed one in front of the other- or, alternatively, only one or other used in the installation. The photo gravure on the right juxtaposes the image of the Falls with the coastline of the UK, and its small-scale waterfall at Chapman’s pool after the rains. Made in situ, using rock pigments from the place itself.

Microsoft Word – VICTORIA AHRENS_CentreforBritishPhotography_2023.docx

Overlap, Mine is Yours (2023)
Three TV monitors, three video pieces of still images, that overlap and loop 110 cm (h) x 90 cm
Free standing

This installation piece is made up of three video collages of still images that interweave and overlap on the screens. They depict images of the Altiplano in South America, where volcanos and mountains relate to the origins of the earth, with the eroded coastlines of the South West of the UK. They share a cretaceous and Jurassic past, and these otherworldly looped pieces, create poetic encounters between bodies of earth that would once have been part of a single land mass. The piece is a commentary on the Anthropocene and the discourses that divide us. Our encounters with landscapes of disappearance and change are often precarious. We are estranged from the spaces that make us, places where the mineral and human collide. These are also places where the minerals used in mining for the photographic industry come from- the aluminium of polaroid strips, the lithium for batteries and bits for computers and digital cameras; the iron ore, chalk, and sulphates for the development processes. These landscapes remind us the we are extracting what we need from them with only the illusory image of their forms to give back: the photographic fragments, taken from the world, are then projected back onto it through screens and monitors, as memorials of that which is disappearing.