Van Zijll Langhout / Contemporary Art is pleased to present the work by Leonid Tsvetkov, (Rijksakademie 2009/2010), in collaboration with Marc Philip van Kempen, during the Amsterdam Art Weekend 2019, opening on Friday 22 November. The exhibition ‘Compost’ stages a conversation between two artists, Leonid Tsvetkov and Marc Philip van Kempen, on the topic of materiality in digital culture. Both artists employ the fleeting remnants of processed data and used hardware in their practice: Leonid Tsvetkov works with electronic waste to construct representations of excavated landscapes and dystopic cities, while Marc van Kempen contrives 3dimensional spaces from images found online. In Van Kempen’s work, the reconstructed images, built back into minute detail, collide and form chaotic collage-like structures that present theatrical dioramas of digital entropy. Tsvetkov’s created landscapes blur the boundaries between geography and territory, calling into question artificial material constraints; everyday distractions, notifications, constant data flows, digital hoarding, and electronic waste have transformed lives, cultures, and landscapes into new forms, resulting in a dizzying, unrelenting state of change. The work of these two artists addresses the present abundance of information in our lives, recalling a former analogue world through the processing hardware and media products and transforming both through a kind of composting by means of artistic practice.

Leonid Tsvetkov (Soviet Union, 1980) is an Amsterdam based Russian-American artist best known for his site- specific installations, manufactured spaces, and research into residues, history, and the nature of change. A graduate of Yale University (2006), he has been a fellow of the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), the American Academy in Rome, and Asia Culture Institute (Gwanju, South Korea), as well as other institutes in Europe and the United States. His work investigates the frailty of physical, social, and conceptual boundaries, calling attention to the impermanence of landscapes, borders, and memory. A process-based artist, he employs archaeological deposits, consumer waste, electro- chemical reactions, social encounters, and material interventions to create objects and landscapes designed to link place and memory, monument and event. His work has appeared at RA Foundation Hanoi, (Vietnam), Z-33 Hasselt, (Belgium), Marres House for Contemporary Culture Maastricht, (Netherlands), Sammlung Ludwig Bamberg, (Germany) and at the Ex Elettrofonica Gallery (Rome), as well as in several other locations in Europe, the United States, and Asia.