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Presentation

A renowned Canadian photographer, travelling around the planet for decades and exploring the residual landscapes left behind by our modern existence, Edward Burtynsky has produced images of an uncanny beauty, evoking abundance and absence, the local and global issues around water and oil, the exploitation of resources and the resulting impact on labour forces and populations. Burtynsky recently delivered an ambitious and panoramic project of all the components of a development that is as coherent as it is politically committed, Anthropocene.
This Canadian Cultural Centre exhibition proposes a new and subjective crossing of the corpuses of this colossal body of work. Mounds and Voids focuses on the industrial and human means convened in the profitable exploitation of land, on the overall equilibrium of the mounds and voids created by our local imbalances, on the subterranean sections and reliefs that have nothing natural about them. Far away from the large urban centres and the everyday lives of the privileged, what imprints do the operations of digging and piling leave on our planet? What do we see and what do we know of those who dig, extract, pile up and work with bare hands where industrial machinery cannot?
Starting with an immersive and contrasting face-to-face between an industrial mining site and an artisanal mining site, both in Africa. The exhibition offers a striking and paradoxical look behind the scenes at our world, inviting us to evaluate the local and global issues of the exploitation of resources. Mounds and Voids: From Human to Global Scale is also a reflection on the construction of the image and its own power, in the very singular form of the mastery of the representation of space and of the scale of things, as well as on the assumed exploitation of technology in the service of an exploring gaze thwarting and defying the limits of perception.
The exhibition brings together two monumental works produced in Johannesburg and Madagascar from Edward Burtynsky’s most current project, Africa; additionally we explore an ensemble of augmented reality experiences constituting a meditation on the memory of industrial relics; and a condensed selection of fourteen photographs tackling the procedures of visual elaboration of land use and recycling.

Catherine Bédard

Main Gallery

“I have come to think about my preoccupation with the Anthropocene – the indelible marks left by humankind on the geological face of our planet – as a conceptual extension of my first and most fundamental interests as a photographer. I’ve always been concerned with showing how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks. At the hearth of my challenge has been the pursuit of vantage points that best enable me to picture the relationship of these systems to the land.
From my earliest shooting trips in the 1980s, I always sought to free my lens from ground level. In the early early work on railcuts, homesteads, quarries, mines and shipbreaking yards, I tried to find elevated spots to plant my tripod: a berm, a bridge, a rooftop or overpass; a perch that offered sweeping overviews of the subject matter. For my China and Oil projects I rented mobile scissor-lifts and bucket-lift trucks, raising myself up from the earthbound vantage points of my earlier work, taking in the wider spectacle. The year 2006, however, marked a major change towards digital technology and a new way of generating work. I could now mount and electronically control my camera from a 40-foot pneumatic monopod. By using drones, airplanes, and helicopters, I could also achieve a bird’s eye perspective, rendering subjects such as transportation networks, mining, agricultural and industrial infrastructure more expansively, capturing vistas that had eluded me until then. Rather then having my work be dictated by the limitations of topography or man-made structures, my lens could now literally fly.”

Edward Burtynsky, “Life in the Anthropocene”, in Edward Burtynsky. Anthropocene, Göttingen, Steidl, 2018, p. 5-6.

EXPOSITION Edward Burtynsky
Mounds and Voids : From Human to Global Scale

Mezzanine

Mounds and voids, mountains of matter, materials, waste, gaping or underground holes are interlinked in the great undertaking that drives Burtynsky. They are the results of operations to strip the soil of its resources. While each image focuses on local impact (a significantly circumscribed site), it implies a global impact. Burtynsky gives shape to a reality that is as evident as it is implacable: the consumption patterns of the “modern world” are based on growth, and growth cannot exist without exploitation on a massive scale. In short, the corollary of production is destruction.

His artistic approach to altered landscapes proceeds from both a knowledge of and a familiarity with the world of industry and an exceptional ability to establish relationships of cause and effect or strong symbolic associations between distant realities. This selection of fourteen images proposes a singular trajectory through the multiple projects, investigations and explorations undertaken by Burtynsky over a twenty-year period (1999–2019). A very compact summary of a colossal oeuvre, this ensemble gives an uncustomary (neither chronological nor thematic) vision of work, and seeks to show the complexity and depth that traverses it, as well as a certain opacity, a compactness that is less seductive and more worrying than it seems. Opening with the now famous Bao Steel slag heap in China, the selection ends with images of the inverted or hollow pyramids that constitute quarries and mines. The circuit begins with the dark tones of fossil fuels, echoed by the Oxford tire piles (a Dantesque dump in California) – objects made of rubber, one of the many petroleum by-products. Then there is a sequence of three images that link Canada to Africa through the presentation of open-pit petroleum exploitations. The contrast between a successful, ultra-protected industrial organization and the desolation of a devastated natural site leaking everywhere echoes the face-to-face of the murals seen in the downstairs gallery. Deforestation, the overconsumption of water associated with tar-sand refining, the pollution of residual water and that of soils infiltrated with uncontained toxicity – all this accumulates in these stagnant images in which an unnatural porosity seems to materialize in an (illusory) alchemy of the image.

Then comes a man sitting on a garbage pile, a dog on the prowl nearby. We have moved from industrial scale to human scale. It is no longer the relationship of humanity to its productions that Burtynsky shows us here, but people that we see from very close up and whose posture or gaze will leave a lasting impression on us. Memorable images in which the recycling of our waste is performed in distant dumps (Bangladesh, Kenya) purchased by states and multinationals at little cost, and where humans manage against all odds to ensure their survival on once natural sites now transformed by heavy machinery.

Dandora Landfill’s cruelly cheerful colours are followed by alternating images of earth and rust. The series of fourteen images closes with a mountain of stone (Carrara, Italy) beside a gigantic hole in the ground (Silver City, Nevada). Their strange resemblance leads us to consider the very essence of the artist’s work. In this final coming together, what is most evident is the impressive mastery of the apprehension and perception of space that characterizes Burtynsky’s oeuvre, the artist succeeding in making us see the fusion of one thing and its opposite in the same image. Those two forms of inverted, hollow pyramids circumscribed by the irregular design of a long dirt road are reminiscent of ancient fortresses from whose heights the surrounding territory was watched over, to be protected…

Catherine Bédard
Traduction anglaise Chrisoula Petridis pour le CCC

“China’s recent rise as a global steel power has been led by Shanghai Baosteel Group, a stateowned industrial showcase on the banks of the Yangtze River, north of downtown Shanghai, that is the country’s biggest, most modern steel manufacturer. Baosteel is the sixth largest steel producer in the world. The company employs 15,600 people. Almost all of Baosteel’s iron ore is imported, being sourced in Australia, Brazil, South Africa and India. In 2005, Baosteel will produce 16 million tons of steel, consuming over 18 million tons of domestic coal in the process. The firm’s products are exported all over the world: East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America and the European Union. Baosteel also supplies steel to Chinese vehicle manufacturers like Audi, General Motors, Ford and Volkswagen and domestic appliance manufacturers, as well as the tubular needs of the Chinese oil and gas exploration industry.”

Edward Burtynsky Studio, “Steel and Coal”, in China. The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Göttingen, Steidl, 2005, p. 125.

“I often look for the largest example of something – the largest mine, the largest quarry, the most active area. Massive operations result in the greatest and most complex transformations. The Oxford Tire Pile gave me a veritable canyon of forty million tires to work with. (…) We are surrounded by all kinds of consumer goods, and yet we are profoundly detached from the sources of those things. Our lifestyles are made possible by industries all around the world, but we take them for granted as background to our experience. I feel that by showing those places which are normally outside our experience, but very much a part of our everyday lives, I can add to our understanding if who we are and what we are doing. The world is replete with subject matter.”

Edward Burtynsky interviewed by Michael Torosian, “The Essentiel Element: An Interview with Edward Burtynsky”,
in Manufactured Landscapes.
The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2003, p. 46.

“The Dandora Landfill is among the largest of its kind in the world. Referred to as Nairobi’s Municipal Dumping Site, the area receives industrial, agricultural, commercial and medical waste, amounting to about 2,000 tonnes per day. Due to its location next to the Nairobi River, any runoff is carried into the water system. It is estimated that more than a million people live in the vicinity of the landfill. Decommissioned in 2012, the landfill was never officially closed and continues to operate with no active replacement.
Residents work informally, sorting scrap by hand and selling it to newly built recycling plants on site. The mounds in these images, some fifteen feet high, are composed primarily of less-valuable plastic bags. In 1950, less than two million tonnes of plastics were manufactured globally per year. By the early twenty-first century, this amount had reached 300 million tonnes per year. The total cumulative amount of plastics produced by 2015 was calculated to be five billion tons, enough to cover the entire Earth in plastic wrap. Too small for typical methods of filtration, microplastics are virtually ubiquitous in our environment, and are increasingly deposited in sediment layers, making them a key technofossil for the stratigraphic consideration of the Anthropocene. In 2017, plastic bags were banned across Kenya, a move that is made increasingly worldwide by governments that desire to reduce their nation’s plastic footprints.”

Edward Burtynsky Studio, in Edward Burtynsky. Anthropocene, Göttingen, Steidl, 2018, p. 32.

“His recent “Shipbreaking” series (…) examines the merchant marine graveyards of Bangladesh, where poorly paid workers turn decommissioned freighters and tankers into scrap metal, using little more then cutting torches and hand tools. (…) his pictures make startling visual parallels to the expeditionary images of ancient monuments in exotic lands taken by niveteenth-century photographers such as Maxime Du Camp and Francis Frith. The “Shipbreaking” pictures’ faint echo of a discredited colonialist, “Orientalist” vision complicates our admiration of them. The geopolitical position – and self-consciousness – of the viewer are among the pictures’implicit references. Before long, the visual affinity between the shipbreaking fields and a sculpture garden enters one’s mind. (…) If we are conversant with modern and contemporary sculpture, as Burtynsky evidently is, we may then recognize a sour irony. The Bangladeshi shipbreakers unwittingly invert the ambitions of twentieth-century sculptors such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, and David Smight, who dreamed of making a train by hand.”

Kenneth Baker, “Form Versus Portent: Edward Burtynsky’s Endangered Landscapes”, in Manufactured Landscapes.
The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2003, p. 41