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Danish Arts Foundation: What thoughts and considerations underlie this work?

Morten Barker: Deformation in No Man’s Land takes its starting point in a twisted piece of metal that I found at Hevring Shooting Range. The metal has undergone deformation through an explosion. The photograph is a construction made from composite film stills taken from the American war film Men in War (1957), directed by Anthony Mann. Together, the photograph and the metal are conceived as an abstract narrative about war, the forces and mutability of landscapes, and a processing of photographic time.

DAF: How can this work be seen in relation to your other work?

MB: The work is the beginning of a photographic series that creates new landscape constructions from war film stills. It is a project that draws inspiration from a wide range of theoretical ideas, from Russian montage theory, Paul Virilio’s book War and Cinema, to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series Theaters. The project has been in development for a long time and is inspired by video recordings from a Danish tank, which I gained access to during my work on The Landscape In Between in 2013. In the video recordings from the tank’s targeting camera, you can see how the cannon swivels from side to side to scan the landscape for enemies. This is where the idea arose to assemble these recordings into photographic landscapes.

DAF: What materials and/or techniques have you used?

MB: Deformation in No Man’s Land consists of two elements: a twisted piece of metal that has been surface-treated with graphite, and a Lambda print on a dibond plate in an oak weave frame, assembled from stills from Anthony Mann’s film Men in War (1957).