Amshu Chukki - After Albert Steiner
Amshu Chukki's series of video installation and etching viscosity prints attempts to re-trace the various trails to the locations in and around St. Moritz where Albert Steiner took his photographs.
He further visits these locations to re-stage some of the landscapes within Stiener's photographs in the contemporary. This re-staging and traversing of the landscape as a frequent visitor to the Engadin since 2014 is in lieu of his longstanding preoccupation with exploring ideas of the landscape. In a series of ten small video installations, tiny projections of landscapes, are projected onto rocks he collects from the sites where he re-stages Stiener's photographs. These landscapes converge as small beams of light projections illuminating the rock textures and surfaces that have weathered and witnessed time in the valley.
Corresponding to each of the ten video installations are ten multicolor viscosity etching prints and ten engraved zinc plates. The process of etching on zinc plates that Chukki uses is akin to the photogravure techniques and processes that Steiner used for his photographs, where the zinc plates become the negative block and the prints become the positive images through which the landscapes are unearthed in the process of printmaking. These works look at the idea of landscape through ideas of staging, geological time, memory, textures, and changing colors of the seasons in the valley
Mario D’Souza