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Marine Target
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Lukas Marxt, who created the masterpiece Ralfs Farben (2019), continues the disquieting exploration of the Salton Sea begun in his Imperial Irrigation (2020). Marine Target maps, in 9 minutes and 20 seconds, a site haunted by traces of catastrophic USA nuclear testing. Marxt’s images and sounds, at first, feign impersonality. As a drone camera slowly descends to a small, long-abandoned “marine target” in the middle of the water as framed from an aerial perspective above, a mechanically produced voice rattles off dry, official, military facts and figures. However, the accumulating sights of dead birds, wire fences that point to a void, and ominously broken pipelines narrate the hints of a darker backstory. © Adrian Martin September 2022 |
