Mariele Neudecker – Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes

Mariele Neudeker’s deep sea and arctic works created in collaboration with scientists and the curatorial support of Invisible Dust were shown at HOUSE 2013, Brighton Festival.

As the lead artist for HOUSE 2013, Mariele Neudecker presented ‘Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes’ – an installation set over three floors of Regency House in Brighton. The idea of the piece was to create a ‘geophysical slice’ of a recorded, yet fictionalized landscape through the air, earth and deep sea as visitors ascend and descend through the floors of the building.

The installation by Neudecker, used the entire building as a container for a body of connecting works combining sculpture, video and photography using material shot on locations including the Arctic, Azores, Australia and some of the world’s deepest oceans. The interior of Regency Town House presented an otherworldly vessel for Neudecker’s commission; beginning in Greenland’s stratosphere at the top of the building and descending to the dark depths of the South West Indian Ocean in its basement rooms.

DEEP SEA
In The Regency Town House Basement, ‘Heterotopias’ plunged 2000 fathoms deep into the South West Indian Ocean in the form of various video works by Neudecker. This included her first work from her collaboration with Professor Alex Rogers ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’. This was a 2-channel video installation and mirror and a series of small monitors situated in the old wine cellar, kitchen and servants’ quarters. The works revealed the world’s most isolated marine environments rarely accessible to humans.

The development of these works came from Neudecker’s collaboration with Rogers, a marine biologist at Oxford University and founder of IPSO a campaign to support the oceans. Neudecker’s artwork engages with unknowable murky spaces and landscapes often exploring the subconscious. Neudecker and Rogers discussed their perceptions of the deep sea and how Rogers feels as a scientist researching such an unexplored area, with comparisons to outer space in terms of our knowledge and understanding. Rogers gave Neudecker access to his video footage whilst he was on the RRS James Cook, examples include the sun setting behind their deep sea mountain range at 200m below the water.

ARCTIC
As part of her research in 2012 Neudecker spent one month in Greenland and took part in a dog sled hunting expedition to the north west of the country. Her artworks are based on the journey’s experiences and sights and is a collaboration with explorer and prolific nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, who has spent  around 16 years traveling around Greenland and the Arctic. Working from the latest to earliest technologies in a timeline, she recorded visual images with digital, analogue, single use and pinhole cameras, light-tight bags and drawings.

Neudecker also presented work in a separate exhibition ‘The Air Itself is One Vast Library‘ at Lighthouse for 2013 Brighton Festival.

See the Deep Water seamount expedition blog.

Image: © Mariele Neudecker, 2012. ‘Midnight Ilulissat’