No Horizon

[2007]

“No Horizon" [Czyzyny Runway]. The work consists of seven panels creating a panoramic/horizontal sequence presenting an abandoned runway in the north part of Krakow, Poland. The runway, built in 1920-ies and used until 1970-ies, now is an enormous space of concrete, an industrial desert becoming anonymous over time- a non-place, both place and placeless, surrounded by equally anonymous blocks of flats.

“No Horizon” is a documentary record of a place, a passage from journey to experience to a representation of that experience. Roni Horn uses the expression ‘inner geography’, examining that area of overlap between inner and outer spaces, between the body and its surroundings. In order to record and distill what is essential to its identity, the runway was photographed in for a few consecutive days, on different hours, constantly changing light and weather. In that context “No Horizon” is a time-based work. There is a relation to the passage of time and space: locating me in time and place, the photograph became a record of having been there, the trace of ones/my presence in place – an autobiographical record of the landscape. I have used an elongated panorama format to invite a viewer to interact with the space of the image and to experience the illusory appearance of the horizon line.

While working on the project I was trying to explore how we perceive, and represent, time and space and also how we “read” and sense an existing physical place. Is it possible to experience space, or can we experience place but only imagine/ comprehend space? Do we experience place but only recognize space? Can we recognize (and understand) space without experiencing it?

The subsequent stages of a transformation of the photographic image (specific reality- precise moment and location in space -photographic image- print) into another (etching) medium not only followed the perception processes but also reconstituted somehow reality imprinted in the photo-emulsion. It has been here as Barthes reads the photographic image and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present and already deferred. Being a strictly documentary record of a place, “No Horizon” is at the same time the abstraction of a landscape, an almost transparent representation of loss and disappearance, fragility of edifices.

The basic idea was to create a horizon (or an experience of the horizon), but also to show how the ground is split, open: its appearance and self- dissolution that shapes the idea of place; the idea of a landscape and its ephemerality. The attempt was to create a kind of space, that does not go outwards, but backwards, completely into itself, a space in which the light comes not from outside, but from the inside. I wanted to invite a viewer to interact with the space of the image and to experience the illusory appearance of the horizon line. I would like the viewer to think about the space that the work projects and find his relationship to it.