Base-Alpha Gallery is showcasing the work of Belgian photographer Veronika Pot as part of Paris Photo 2025, featuring her innovative mixed-media installation titled "The valley is quiet, the torment indefinitely." The exhibition presents a complex artistic exploration that combines photography, sculpture, and sound to create an immersive experience that challenges viewers' perceptions of landscape and reality.
Pot's mountain landscape photographs serve as the foundation for her artistic process, captured during her extensive travels over the past three years. Her unique methodology involves printing these photographs multiple times in a traditional darkroom, then physically cutting them apart and reassembling them like puzzle pieces. The final images are produced as digital archival prints, to which she adds vibrant color accents using acrylic paint. These color interventions stem from what she describes as a compulsive need to disrupt and transform the original images while adding precise visual observations of the landscapes she encountered.
The installation features 14 miniature sculptures that accompany the photographic works, creating a disturbing yet captivating narrative. These small figurines offer few discernible details, with many appearing mutated and existing in a space between violence and absurdity. The scenes depicted are deliberately unsettling: two figures appear to be facing execution in a barren plain, while others show the taunting and torture of a bear. Additional miniatures portray struggles between figures and a family that appears either blissful or sinking into a swamp, creating an ambiguous emotional landscape.
The miniature sculptures draw inspiration from art-historical and philosophical subjects, particularly referencing the dark imagery found in Francisco Goya's paintings. Pot constructs these scenes using toy figures, beeswax, and spray paint, creating new emotional and personal interpretations that twist reality and turn familiar concepts upside down. This approach allows her to explore themes of human nature, violence, and absurdity through a contemporary lens while maintaining connections to classical artistic traditions.
Sound plays a crucial role in the installation, continuing Pot's practice of incorporating audio elements into her work, sometimes combined with video components. The accompanying soundscape presents fragmented textual elements and contemplative musings that have been woven together into a cohesive monologue. These texts undergo digital conversion into sounds that mimic human speech, creating an eerie, artificial voice that guides viewers through the emotional landscape of the work. The musical composition by Stephan Pot serves as a unifying element that connects all components of the installation.
Pot's artistic process centers on the transformation of images and the selective processing of memories into new visual narratives. She captures moments with the intention of later revisiting and reinterpreting them, often rendering the original images completely unrecognizable. This methodology raises questions about context, memory, and the reliability of visual documentation. Her work focuses on landscapes, mountains, and figures that she continuously re-views, re-memorizes, and re-visualizes through her artistic practice.
Ambiguity serves as the core element of Pot's visual language, creating works that resist simple interpretation and invite multiple readings. The installation is completed with ceramic supports for the photographs, designed by Nele Bollen under the title "Torments," which further enhance the overall aesthetic and thematic coherence of the presentation. This collaboration adds another layer of artistic interpretation to the already complex visual narrative that Pot has constructed.
