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Nguyen Wahed at Art Brussels 2025: Addie Wagenknecht, Tomasz Kulka, Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler

Past exhibition
24 - 27 April 2025
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Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler, 3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii, 2025 Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler, 3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii, 2025. Courtesy of Nguyen Wahed and the artists.

Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler

3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii, 2025
84 scans on analogue photographic paper, neural networks (various architectures), original digital image, custom dynamic website with combination collages updated every 2 mins, the script randomizing the output.
250 x 150 cm
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3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii continues Crespo’s and Ridler's exploration of recording and exploring the world around them through the plants they see and the gardens they have. It is drawn...
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3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii continues Crespo’s and Ridler's exploration of recording and exploring the world around them through the plants they see and the gardens they have. It is drawn from a large clematis that grows at one of their houses that blooms briefly for a few weeks at the end of March, signally the start of spring. Their genesis piece, made at roughly the same time of year, contained a tiny fragment of this flower; this time it is blown up and expanded into a large photographic print and online digital permutations, inverting the techniques of the first work.

Over the course of the short blooming period the artists documented the plant at different times of the day through different photographic methods. Both in their individual and combined practices both artists are deeply interested in objectivity, especially as it relates to science and natural history, and question whether it is truly possible to document or record a thing. The title references the impossibly large number of variations of hanging the piece, whilst also nodding to the way there are millions of different ways of experiencing the same plant. This question is further brought out by the use of machine learning, which by its nature collapses and flattens. The artists tried to capture the essence of their source plant and make it eternal but fail through the inherent frailty of their material.


The piece is made up a large scale installation of tiled photographic prints created from a collage of these different clematis: some sourced directly from the ordinal dataset, some from the variety of neural nets the artists used but all retranslated through photographic printing. The artists are inspired by early pioneers in botanical history such as Anna Atkins who recorded through the latest technologies of the time. The print also has an online, equally fragile, counterpart - a digital version that will eventually run through all of the possible different permutations that the piece can be displayed. Whilst the internet or blockchain are thought to be eternal, they are underpinned by systems that can and do break and vanish. Both versions are subject to collapse and decay, whilst the original, actual clematises will keep regrowing and blooming, undisturbed by it all.


In contrast to their individual practices where they can take years to produce a project, their collaborations are rapid and respond to fleeting and transitory phenomena - a particular flower blooming, being in a particular place at a particular time. The artists try to record an impression of it and their experiences. This manifests itself in many ways - in this piece the weather of spring, rain, is subtly included in the printing process - so that rather than being strict mimesis it becomes something more through their understanding.


The work includes 84 scans of the prints on photographic paper, original digital file, a custom website with collage combinations randomized every 2 mins, and the script randomizing the output.


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504 E 12th St, New York

NY 10009

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