Art Arktis

It’s another world that we never get the chance to see with dimensions that are impossible for us to imagine. A world from another time that has barely changed over the millennia. Completely cut off from the rest of the planet by the Antarctic circumpolar current, this is a place where nature has retained its balance. Frozen water droplets are rendered immobile in the same place for millions of years, providing 80% of our planet’s drinking water reserves in their multiplicity. As a result of this, the Antarctic is coming to be a focus of interest. The world’s powers are now starting to lay claim to the ‘unwanted continent’: unwanted by them because they previously had no use for it.

Art Arktis is a series of fine art photographs which demonstrate the beauty, diversity and fragility of this magnificent untouched world. With the help of the latest Hasselblad camera technology, artists Tini Papamichalis and Dietmar Baum have captured image worlds that would ordinarily have remained concealed in the perpetual ice, invisible to the human eye. They reveal picturesque, surreal and apparently otherworldly structures.

“The First Drop” and “Future” encourage us to question our powers of perception. Are they photographs? Paintings? Or perhaps a computer animation? “Deception Iceland” is an almost graphic landscape that could well be a subtle analogy to the black and white structures on a sealskin.

The Art Arktis series combines lyrical images of this vast expanse of land, its diverse inhabitants and  bizarre close-ups that provide us with a detailed visualisation of how unique and fragile our planet is. It is an exciting portrait of another world that we must not allow to be destroyed.