The BMW ART MAKERS program enables an artist/curator duo to create an experimental work in contemporary photography and its spatial installation.

With Insolare, Eva Nielsen takes on optical and hydrogeological phenomena, combining them with exposure to light (insolation), a technique used in screen printing.

The project, a vision of the rural and industrial world, has the artist cross paths with those in areas surrounding Arles, opening into the Camargue. The vast triangular island formed by the Gulf of Lion and the branching of the Rhône, dubbed “They”, becomes a zone of experimentation. The singular, seductive, and hostile space invites interest in the vital properties of the saline environment. Faced with these phenomena and natural forces, drought and rising water, living zones circulate and move in the work of Eva Nielsen, through overlaying silk screen images and paintings, presenting a fragmented vision of these areas. Matter appears translucent through hybrid printing techniques, or in images deposited one after another in layers during the artist’s various excursions.   

A landscape of experience emerges, duplicates and echoes in each of the works. Both photographic and pictorial, the works incarnate this here-and-elsewhere, ever traversed by change, to the point of disappearance for some areas of land. Blurring the lines between media, art practices and motifs, Insolare presents the sedimentation of solar and liquid landscapes in the Camargue through its images. Interweaving ancient and postmodern narratives, this mental map sees the artist transforming and imagining a panorama of multiple landscapes with superimposed contemporary and mythological geological strata. Symptom or ghost of human infrastructures, the large expanses and closed, delimited spaces let invisible forces and energy rise to the surface.

 

Marianne Derrien