Installation (painting, laser cut plexiglass, webcam, projector)

The Abandoned Military Buildings series, as the title suggests, revives the world of abandoned military facilities. The buildings left here as dark memories of the past appear in forgotten places, often reclaimed by nature. KristofLab’s paintings look like black scars on structures that have lost their function, threatening to break the almost Edenian, idealistic landscapes. In the central installation, the imaging possibilities of the past and the present meet: an image made with a traditional painting process is displayed on the object next to it with the help of a webcam and a projector, creating a ghost spectacle, as we often cannot perceive the presence of abandoned military facilities as reality. 

Luca Cserhalmi - esthete, head of the Godot Labor Gallery

“In the twentieth century, humanity has transformed its environment to an ever greater extent. One of our memories of this are the abandoned military concrete bunkers found in places remote from civilization. And there are countless other buildings that have lost their function, and nature has begun to recapture them over time. Think of the residential parks of Chernobyl, or the sunken ships that have been transformed into coral reefs, thus becoming habitats for various aquatic animals. These buildings stand in front of us as mementos, reminiscent of former devastation. 

The works, although dealing with the subject of war, primarily examine the phenomenon as an impact on and destruction of the environment, and thus they are free from political stance. The emphasis is on the meeting of civilization and nature. 

In William Turner’s Steamboat in a Snowstorm, the forces of nature still dominate humanity’s technology defying the sea, but in the works of the Abandoned Military Bulidings series and in our time, the situation has already reversed, as reflected in the technical solution of the central installation. The landscape observed by the webcam is projected onto a board of military fortifications cut out of black plexiglass, creating a digitized projection of reality. The work contrasts the traditional oil on canvas and the XXI. century imaging tools, yet the art forms complement each other and create a new coexistence, doing so in a way that the work reinterprets traditional landscape painting. 

In addition to the work on anti-aircraft batteries (Maunsell sea forts) on the English Channel, two other paintings appear in the installation. One depicts the pyramid of the Nekoma Center, a memento of the fear of the Cold War atomic apocalypse, while the other shows the remains of the control “tower” of an abandoned airport in the California desert. 

Traces of tense twentieth-century history can be found everywhere, from the sea to through the desert to the sloping fields. Painted or plexiglass-cut constructions, stripped down, wedge into a seemingly inappropriate medium and, like a black box, set a grim memory of our recent violent, destructive, and hostile-filled moments, warning us of the excesses of our civilization.”

KristofLab


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Abandoned military buildings