Metropolis & Relics of the Future
Martin Roemers
On Line at Artsy
31 July – 15 August 2021

For over 20 years Dutch artist, Martin Roemers has used photography to translate global themes into human dimensions. In Metropolis, he documents 22 megacities in 5 continents and additionally we introduce the first chapter of a new body of work, Relics of the Future.

Roemers has been documenting the dramatic impact humanity has made on the globe for over 20 years. From his early series, “The Relics of the Cold War”, “Kabul” and “The Eyes of War” he studied issues of conflict and the tools of warfare. In his largest project to date, “Metropolis” (2007 – 2015), Roemers moved on, indulging his fascination for the world’s megacities, attempting to capture the tangible energy, chaos and vibrancy of cities where more than ten million people live, work, and survive.

Just over a century ago 13% of the world was urban. The United Nations predicts that 75 percent of the global population – close to six billion people – are expected to be concentrated in cities by the year 2050. The UN has also designated that 28 of these cities now meet their threshold of a ‘megacity’: defined as those cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. Fascinated by these centres of exploding population, Martin Roemers documented in 22 megacities across five continents, observing the sense of city as spectacle. Working with a large format, analogue film camera, Roemers also documents a sense of time that uniquely captures a sense of the resilience and ingenuity required to exist in these megacities.

His new developing series, Relics of the Future documents the variety of strange looking colourful and battered vehicles that also populate these cities and keep them moving. Treating the vehicles like archival specimens – literally relics – isolating them from their environment, Roemers has begun an exploration of the symbiosis between a vehicle and its user in different regions across the world, illustrated in a time line that runs from the handcart to the electric car.

Martin Roemers work has been published in multiple monographs and his photographs have been acquired by many public, private, and corporate collections.