In Aneta Willertová’s exhibition So close and yet so far – photographs of landscapes of
Northern Europe we see images taken on an island looking towards the land, above a forest searching for the nearest village, and on a river bank staring at Russia. Willertová is interested in what we are actually seeing: the landscape or our own memories? How much information is getting lost in the technical andmaterial processes, and how much is getting lost when we look at someone else’s images?
Willertová, coming from a densely inhabited Centre Europe, reflects on the experiences of space surrounding her in Finland, Sweden, Åland and Estonia. The journeys are long with few or no human-connections, snow is deep in the winter and the water bodies are hard to cross without proper equipment. The further North one goes, the stronger the space feels. For Willtertová, the space works as a metaphor: in the North both places and people are hard to reach.
On view at Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre’s foyer gallery are landscape images lacking humans. These images are juxtaposed with a photo taken on the bank of Narva river depicting the conflict on the Russian border – how people set up borders when the actual distance does not correlate with the distance between mindsets, rights and possibilities.
Printed in postcard sizes, through her images Willertová is asking will the landscape be irretrievably lost in the end?When photography turns from an experience to something material, will the real become something abstract?
Aneta Willertová
So close and yet so far – photographs of landscapes of Northern Europe
Images of the Month
Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre foyer gallery
18.11.2023–4.2.2024
