deception island | troika
For the inaugural exhibition at the new location of max goelitz in Munich, Troika explores the fragile boundaries between what is seen and unseen, present and absent, natural and constructed. The works in deception island chart a cartography of displacement and emergence, where extinct species, digital flora and machine-mediated visions converge. Taking its title from a volcanic island at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula – a place whose very geography conceals a flooded caldera beneath its surface – the exhibition reflects on environments in flux and the systems, technological and cultural, that attempt to capture, preserve or replace them.
The island itself surfaces in one of the platinotypes from Troika’s new series Out of Place, Out of Time, where an extinct Key Largo cactus improbably takes root against its stark Antarctic backdrop. Landscapes conjured in split seconds by text-to-image generators have been committed to a medium designed to endure for centuries. Platinotypes fuse palladium and platinum salts – minerals critical to both early photography and contemporary computing. Like echoes of expeditions past, they question what it means to map and possess worlds increasingly mediated by artificial vision.
This sense of arrival in unstable terrain continues in Ultraflora, a series of sculptures grown from 3D scans of pioneer plants like the Tree Aeonium. Here, the species has been scanned into digital space and printed back into matter – transformed and re-materialized as delicate metal forms, prototypes of life adapting to the unknown.
These new bodies of works, are presented alongside landscape paintings from the series Forest Filled with Pines and Electronics, shown in Troika’s solo exhibition Pink Noise at the Langen Foundation, Neuss earlier this year.
deception island traces arrivals into unfamiliar terrain – ecological, technological and symbolic – where life and image meet at shifting thresholds.
Opening | Munich
Wednesday 24 September
6 – 9 pm
The artists will be present
