In Markul’s sculptures and installations dominate natural materials, and frequently light is an essential element. Her work Excavations of the Future (2016), for instance, is an installation made of felt, wax, and rope, illuminated by a piece of blue neon. This work is part of a larger project: After travelling to Mexico and visiting the ceremonial architecture of Mesoamerica, in Teotihuacán, there was born in her the need to evoke these places and represent their symbolism, to find the balance between the temporary stratum that separates the natural from the intangible.
Especially with her video works it becomes obvious that the artist is primarily fascinated by abandoned or overlooked, frequently perilous places. Examples of this are works such as Bambi à Tchernobyl (2014), Si les heures m’étaient comptées and Zone Yonaguni(both 2016), or Deadly Charm of Snakes (2020).
With her large-scale video installation La mémoire des glaciers / Memory of the Glaciers, Angelika Markul has created a myth that tells of the origins, evolution and life cycles of humankind. The work begins with black-and-white footage of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and then transitions into aerial videos of glacier landscapes filmed in El Calafate, Argentina, in southern Patagonia. Markul, by editing the film material and inserting animations – with Côme Aguiar’s suggestive music accompanying the whole – choreographs a sequence of landscape impressions that expand into a gigantic panorama.
The images of melting glaciers, which can be found at various locations on earth and reveal dramatic changes in the climate and our habitat, are tragically beautiful. Creation and decay, birth and death are equally preserved in the rocks of the earth and the ice of the glaciers. Angelika Markul zeroes in on their hidden secrets without revealing them. She succeeds in achieving this with images in which riddles abound, riddles that cannot be solved. This video work from 2017, which has previously been shown under its French title La mémoire des glaciers, is the first part of a trilogy that Angelika Markul completed with the videos Bepicolombo and Marella in 2020.
Angelika Markul was born in 1977 in Szczecin, Poland; she lives and works in Paris. Solo exhibitions have been mounted in her honour, among others, by the following institutions: Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France (2010), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (2018), Op enheim, Wroclaw, Poland (2020). She has participated in the Lodz Biennial, Poland (2010), Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennial, Krasnoyarsk, Russia (2013), Busan Biennial, South Korea (2014); Bienalsur, Buenos Aires (2017 and 2019),
