labscapes 2007

artists: Herwig Turk, Paulo Pereira

lambda prints

size: 150x120cm

mounted on aluminium

The work "labscapes" , which look like a collection of conceptual still life evidence, afford an ethnographer’s view of laboratory instruments. As the works focus on depicting the materiality of the lab objects, the statement they make about the processes of knowledge construction at the laboratory is filled with tension.

The laboratories which Herwig Turk pictures are detailed documentary-like presentations of labs as sites of real empirical research – however, it is precisely the seemingly uncommented depiction of the instruments themselves which gives the objects more expressive power and makes them look like actors rather than passive objects.

The still lives show the lab as an environment with condensed and heightened atmosphere where natural and social orders with occasionally ambivalent relations are reconfigured. In laboratory practice, just like in art practice, objects are taken out of their “natural” environment and installed in a new field of phenomena, defined by social players and always subject to re-negotiation. Natural objects can be modelled and transformed under specific laboratory conditions so that they turn into epistemic objects the emergence of which is inseparably linked with technical or instrumental requirements.