Malmö Art Museum, 2025-2026
One Moment and some Million Years Reading of a Ruin 

Excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition:

The sculpture Reading of a Ruin (2024) builds on a 3D-scanned model of a ruin, which, in turn, was based on a digital image from Pompeii. Brockmann’s work reveals several layers of authenticity. The digital image of the ruin was incomplete and flawed, so the computer had to guess what the missing parts would look like.

The result was printed as a 3D model, which was when cast in bronze. The plinth on which the ruin stands resembles archaeological ranging poles and their markings, which are also used in 3D scans to aid the computer’s understanding of depth.

Brockmann explores remnants of the past. Pompeii is an interesting site for several reasons. The ruins have a mystical quality, like Atlantis – a buried, lost city, that has now been found. Today, Pompeii is a major tourist attraction, drawing 2.5 million visitors each year. It is fascinating how people interact with something that is more than 2,000 years old. Pompeii can never again be viewed from its own construction date. When looking at something from another era, it is always with our own contemporary eyes.

In this way, a digital translation of an image of a ruin becomes an interpretation that carries losses of information, which in turn give rises to new interpretations. Even though we move further away from the original itself, it is these translations that interests Brockmann.

In the marble work One Moment and Some Million Years (2024), we can compare the unfathomable brevity of the era of mankind in relation to the geological time scale. Marble is around 160 million years old. The design of the sculpture resembles a sudden accident, something spilled in passing.

Brockmann opens the door to a poetic approach to the exhibition An Order of Things that helps us understand how transient these order are. But also to the technical progress that influences how we see and perceive artefacts that are problematised with regard to authenticity, reproduction and reconstruction.

From the exhibition An Order of Things at Malmö Konstmuseum, 2025-2026

Photo: hlstrm and Adèle Tornberg