Towards Tomorrow (International Date Line, Alaska), 2001
Marine Hugonnier
© Courtesy of the artist
Collection
Lambda print mounted on aluminium
120 x 160 cm
Towards Tomorrow (International Date Line, Alaska) is the result of Marine Hugonnier's trip to the Bering Strait in Alaska, USA, to photograph across the International Date Line into Siberia.
The International Date Line was set by an international convention in 1884. The globe was divided up into time zones and this maritime frontier between Russia and the United States became something of an unreal space, opening up a 24-hour gap between the two adjoining territories. Catching the sunset over that line, Marine Hugonnier is therefore photographing the coming day, offering, in effect, pictures of a future moment. While pandering to convention, she contrives to realize that utopia of time travel, offering an unusual, complex-free view of the future. In so doing, the artist first overturns the certainties of this particular medium, for, as Roland Barthes writes, ‘in photography, this is a dual joint position: of reality and the past. And as this constraint exists only for photography, we have to take it to be […] the very essence, the noeme of Photography.’ Turned towards tomorrow, the work actually contradicts the principle behind it. But, beyond just the medium of photography, Towards Tomorrow insists primarily on this human conception of some universal time that goes against nature. Is tomorrow already here? Or, doesn’t the future exist? The future is improbable, time’s arrow has lost its sense of direction, north is now not the future but the present instant. The photographs of course take issue with this conception of universal time. ‘Homogeneous time’, that shared scientific and social notion, becomes obsolete… The phenomenological experience of the world is eclipsed by what looks like the triumph of pragmatism. Through this specific questioning, the artist is pointing more generally to the gradual disappearance of the very principle of reality. Marine Hugonnier’s photographs tend to reveal this inevitable disintegration of the world by the rational act. The artist questions the way we apprehend the universe, and writes the well-known words of Baudrillard in what might be a comment on her work: ‘Reality does not disappear in the illusion, the illusion disappears in the fullness of reality.’ – Guillaume Mansart
*1969 in Paris, France I Living and working in London, United Kingdom
120 x 160 cm
Towards Tomorrow (International Date Line, Alaska) is the result of Marine Hugonnier's trip to the Bering Strait in Alaska, USA, to photograph across the International Date Line into Siberia.
The International Date Line was set by an international convention in 1884. The globe was divided up into time zones and this maritime frontier between Russia and the United States became something of an unreal space, opening up a 24-hour gap between the two adjoining territories. Catching the sunset over that line, Marine Hugonnier is therefore photographing the coming day, offering, in effect, pictures of a future moment. While pandering to convention, she contrives to realize that utopia of time travel, offering an unusual, complex-free view of the future. In so doing, the artist first overturns the certainties of this particular medium, for, as Roland Barthes writes, ‘in photography, this is a dual joint position: of reality and the past. And as this constraint exists only for photography, we have to take it to be […] the very essence, the noeme of Photography.’ Turned towards tomorrow, the work actually contradicts the principle behind it. But, beyond just the medium of photography, Towards Tomorrow insists primarily on this human conception of some universal time that goes against nature. Is tomorrow already here? Or, doesn’t the future exist? The future is improbable, time’s arrow has lost its sense of direction, north is now not the future but the present instant. The photographs of course take issue with this conception of universal time. ‘Homogeneous time’, that shared scientific and social notion, becomes obsolete… The phenomenological experience of the world is eclipsed by what looks like the triumph of pragmatism. Through this specific questioning, the artist is pointing more generally to the gradual disappearance of the very principle of reality. Marine Hugonnier’s photographs tend to reveal this inevitable disintegration of the world by the rational act. The artist questions the way we apprehend the universe, and writes the well-known words of Baudrillard in what might be a comment on her work: ‘Reality does not disappear in the illusion, the illusion disappears in the fullness of reality.’ – Guillaume Mansart
*1969 in Paris, France I Living and working in London, United Kingdom