Paris. When Klaus Thymann founded in 2008 “Project Pressure”, a charitable organization with an ecological and climatic vocation, the Danish photographer and scientist intends to raise awareness and mobilize, by art and science, to climate change and their consequences. The 30 -year -old at the time has already led different expeditions around the world to study in particular the disappearance of glaciers. His photographs, rewarded by several prizes, have integrated museum collections. Since then, he has become a member of the Royal Geographical Society in Great Britain and is part of the UNESCO expert list for the ocean sciences at the service of sustainable development.
In addition, as part of Project Pressure, shipping projects brought together artists and scientists on ecological and climatic questions, projects for the first time exhibited together in 2019 under the title of “Meltdown” (Fusion) at the Vienna Natural History Museum, in Austria. The traveling exhibition brought together, among other things, the work of Noémie Goudal, Edward Burtynsky, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Peter Funch and Klaus Thymann.
Peter Fitch, Mount Baker from Skyline Divide With Clouds Obscuring Summit.
© Peter Funch
In the two -color, Project Pressure offers an exhibition entitled “Double Mirror”. It is part of the line of “meltdown”, but is designed on the scale of the spaces of the cultural platform of contemporary art of the House of Denmark in Paris, and is focused on two stories compared: “The imperfect atlas” of Fitch and “East Greenland Transect” of Thymann. These two projects relate to the decline of glaciers-the first in the United States, the other in Greenland-and have in common the use of the archive. The “Imperfect Atlas” of Fitch thus combines postcards and old images of Mont Baker (3,280 m) and Mont Rainier (4,392 m) from the collections of the University of the State of Washington and large format photographs of the two United States volcanoes, made in the same place a few decades later. The trichromy, an ancient process which he revisits, generates a blurred superposition of colors and a distortion of the image, “Metaphor for the evolution of the landscape” For the Danish photographer as well as cities that have developed at the foot of these two volcanoes.
This distortion contrasts with the sharpness and the bright light of the photographs of Thymann on the south-eastern coast of Greenland. These photos are built from images of the topographic survey made in 1933 by the Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen as part of his 7th expedition carried out from Thule, on the west coast. From these black and white shots brought out and studied by the project of Project Pressure to identify the precise points of these old shots, Klaus Thymann has redone new images of the glaciers of this region. For the Parisian exhibition, the photographer pulled 8 in large format. Their juxtaposition with those made in the same place, almost a hundred years earlier, testifies to the decline in glaciers and the evolution of these landscapes of ice, snow and rock, the object of new lusts. Freezing.
