Government Censorship Is Subject Of Dutch Landscapes By Artist Mishka Henner
Dutch artist Mishka Henner has taken up the issue of censorship in his new series of landscape paintings focussing on the Dutch governments reaction to companies such as Google who have introduced free satellite technology over the last few years.
The Dutch Government have been censoring places such as royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks and in his paintings these classified plots have become bright, multi-coloured polygons contrasting starkly with the Dutch countryside and cities. The use of such a bold censoring technique further highlights the discrepancy between what’s part of the satellite image and what’s been elaborately hidden by the authorities. It has become an unintentional artwork.
Henner goes further with this idea by paralleling these modern impositions in the landscape with those of the 16th Century when the Government of the day began creating man made dunes and dykes to keep the land from becoming submerged under water due to the Netherlands lying below sea level. As the artist himself explains:
Seen from the distant gaze of Earth’s orbiting satellites, the result is a landscape unlike any other; one in which polygons recently imposed on the landscape to protect the country from an imagined human menace bear more than a passing resemblance to a physical landscape designed to combat a very real and constant natural threat.
Via Creators Project
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