Artists have always been fascinated by ruins. As traces of a bygone era, they remind us that our work product, too, is destined to become a ruin. Ruins constitute a source both for interpreting our history and for imagining our future. 

The three artists presented move the ruin into the heart of their work, focussing on its origins and its evolution and culling from the ubiquitous flood of images in online news, in magazines and films. En route to disappearing themselves, these images here give rise to novel forms, on the border between photography and other media.

Brunet’s Boîte Noire is a series of renderings—on paper and tapestries—drawn from a 3D space modelled out of thousands of internet images of ruins from the war in Syria. 

The collages of Maelzer present visions at once apocalyptic and lyrical—futurist hypotheses quilted together from various traces we leave in cities, nature and even outer space.

In Where Mr. Wong Sent Me, Snelling creates a model of parts of the Chinese city Chongqing, with modern high-rises and makeshift shelters overflowing with images as garish as they are ephemeral.