APT Gallery, May 1-18 2025
VICTORIA AHRENS// JOAO VILLAS
Spectral Matters is an exhibition by Victoria Ahrens and Joao Villas, whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. Creating installation pieces, they look to deconstruct the photographic image through material interventions, to challenge what ‘matter’ is.
Where sound vibrates through a system of materials, the floating ruinous landscapes of an abandoned industrial park are collaged through video projections. These create vibrant matter, as Jane Bennett termed it, imbued with a spectral quality. The hauntology of sound waves, translucent images on the wall, and video projections inhabit the gallery space and create connections through language, text, handmade pigments on translucent image-screens.
Victoria’s photographs and videos look at the human and mineral residues of spaces that have slowly disappeared, eroded or become uninhabitable. The traces of their chemical, material residue survive as ruins and recordings – ‘stone tapes’ – memory matter that resides in the material itself. They haunt the gallery with images that hover and overlap with otherworldly colours, toxic, yet alluring- sirens in the inhospitable landscape.
Joao tunes into a frequency – one where the complex vibrations of sound waves subvert meaning, creating an utilitarian architecture of high-tension geometries, signalled by a sequence of piano wires – adaptors and transmitters of an oscillating narrative.
Transmission, disruption and reception – the ongoing loop where misunderstanding gives birth to possibility, another door opened to the dri[ing listener of delayed sounds: aluminium tubes and rippled steel echoing something we know too well.
The retro-futuristic hum of malfunctioning systems, repeated signals, warnings of tragic clichés and ancient prophecies. Stories that haunt us, and vibrate with uncanny familiarity as spectral matters.
Victoria Ahrens 