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'Chromakey'

Pieter Paul Pothoven

  • 20 Mar 2010  –  11 Apr 2010
    De Service GarageDe Service Garage, de Cruquiusweg 79, Amsterdam
    Map
    de Cruquiusweg 79Amsterdam, 

Opening: zaterdag 20 maart 20:00

With:
Pieter Paul Pothoven

Pieter Paul Pothoven

Pieter Paul Pothoven is a multimedia artist living and working in Amsterdam. He worked on various projects related to the Middle East and the way it is represented in the contemporary news media.

Chromakey

Afghanistan has been in a continuous state of war for over thirty years since the Soviet Union invaded the country in the late seventies. It used to be a forgotten war, scarcely covered by the news media. After 9/11 everything changed. With the attack on the Twin Towers the Western world got involved. The media attention increased exponentially and now we find ourselves in a flood of arousing and turbulent news coverage daily.

In the remote Hindu-Kush mountain range in North East Afghanistan are the Lapis Lazuli mines of the Koh-e-Laguard, or the ‘Blue Mountain’. They are the oldest still working mines in the world. In the murky darkness of these shafts this precious blue stone of the best quality has been found for more than 6000 years. Lapis Lazuli is long since praised by the Babylonians, Mesopotamians and old Greek, for its beauty and alleged spiritual powers. Lapis Lazuli also found its way to Europe, where it is grounded into the costly pigment ultramarine blue since the late Middle Ages. At that time the noble blue was mainly reserved for the robes of important religious figures like Virgin Mary. Later on it was more broadly used –besides its splendid color, as a mere symbol of wealth. There is no painter that used it on such an excessive scale as the Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer.

Ultramarine is a light fast pigment. It does not or hardly changes under the influence of light. This extraordinarily stable color blue, that plays a significant but mysterious role in the visual culture of Europe, comes from a country that is currently represented in a rather volatile way by the media. Like a blue screen or a chromakey on a set. Everything that surrounds or is projected on it changes hastily, but the screen itself with its blue color stays inert.

Pothoven ventured behind the informational round-up of Afghanistan in search of the chromakey, the origins of this stable blue. He visited the mines of the Koh-e-Laguard that due to various relentless wars and the impenetrable landscape, are still shrouded in obscurity. Subsequently he mapped them with pseudo-geological methods. Next to the fieldwork he did an archive study to the handful of primarily written resources in existence about the mines and gathered 60 kg of high quality Lapis Lazuli.

The comprehensive exhibition ‘Chromakey’ is a visual conclusion of this research project. It comprises various elements like sculpture, series of photographs and a display of documented archive material. This exhibition shines its light in a subtle and associative way, on the realm of this blue. The world that Pothoven encountered behind the prevailing visual culture of the contemporary news media

Contributions 
Rosa Ronsdorf 
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