Overview
Scarlett Hooft Graafland: Sky Lines
Scarlett Hooft Graafland (b. 1973) is known for her surreal, dream-like photographs that serve as lasting records of her meticulously choreographed, site-specific sculptural interventions and performances in some of the most remote parts of the world, from the salt desert of Bolivia to the desolate Canadian Arctic, the island of Madagascar, and the distant shores of Vanuatu, where her work captures an ongoing exchange between the vastness of nature and the boundaries of culture.
Scarlett Hooft Graafland shot Sky Lines on a beach in Madagascar, which was historically a location for the slave trade, alluding to the term "blue people", enslaved Mozambicans and their descendants, who were reclassified as "Zazamanga" (meaning "blue child") by the Merina regime after the 1877 emancipation. This reclassification was part of the regime's attempt to control and exploit formerly enslaved people, particularly those of Mozambican origin. Hooft Graafland's embroidered lines, she says, chain the women to the sky, a fantastical gesture that alludes to flight and freedom, in an unapologetically ambiguous way.
Hooft Graafland currently has a major retrospective Mesmerizing, on view now through 31 August 2025 at Museum Panorama Mesdag in The Hague.
Edward Burtynsky: Pengah Wall #2, Komodo National Park, Indonesia
Edward Burtynsky (b 1955) is a Canadian artist renowned for his sustained investigation of the "indelible human signature" on the planet, caused by incursions into the landscape on an industrial scale. Burtynsky's large scale aerial photographs reference the sublime and often surreal qualities of human-altered landscapes with an abstracted painterly language. Chronicling the major themes of terraforming and extraction, urbanisation and deforestation, Burtynsky conveys the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion and extinction. Burtynsky says: "Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."
Pengah Wall #2 is an image of a coral reef roughly 60 feet deep, photographed in Komodo National Park, Indonesia, an area spectacularly rich in biodiversity. Captured underwater with a team of ten divers and composited from 160 high-resolution images, measuring a total of 200 square feet (precisely the size of the photographed area), this pristine all-over kaleidoscopic constellation offers a poignant counterpoint to images of the altered environment.
Edward Burtynsky currently has a major solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, The Great Acceleration, on view through 28 September 2025. Marking his first institutional solo show in the city in over two decades, the exhibition features more than seventy works, offering a powerful reflection on the beauty and vulnerability of our human-altered landscapes.
