The exhibition short-shorts, with works by Rita Sobral Campos and August Sander, will open at Galerie Andreas Huber on November 12.
August Sander is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is best known for his portraits, which have shaped the photographic image of society during the Weimar Republic. He structured the series People of the 20th Century in seven categories: ?the Farmer?, ?the Skilled Tradesman?, ?the Woman?, ?Classes and Professions?, ?the Artist?, ?the City? and ?the Last People?. He portraits people in their typical environment, thereby sketching narratives of individual persons, social structures, and a period of German history.
In the current exhibition 6 of his portraits of women are presented in a dialogue with new works by Rita Sobral Campos, who is living in New York. The characters that she develops are not people, as in the works of Sander, but abstract concepts such as punctuation marks and patterns, categories and figures of speech.
Not unlike the start of the joke ?A man walks into a bar?? Rita Sobral Campos starts one of her stories with the words “#5 und #7 were sitting at their favorite place in the Numeral Bar and were chatting about Life, Digits, and Everything else.? This text, entitled Numeral Bar & Hiccups, is one of six stories by Sobral Campos that can currently be read and seen at Galerie Andreas Huber.
The title short-shorts refers in part to the specific text form of short short prose, which Sobral Campos uses here, prose consisting of less than a thousand words. They are texts that place the artist in the tradition of absurdist literature and in which humor and satire play a central role. She animates and personifies objects, imagining possible dialogues and conflicts. Text vs. Author can be read as a theoretically informed and yet absurd reflection on the phenomenon of text. In Full Stop a punctuation mark heads for the barricades, declares its independence, and takes up contact with the bemused author. Her own writing process and the interrogation of the all too self-evident usage of signs, whose meaning is only based on general consent, becomes the occasion for a story. This fundamental examination of the material text finds expression in the presentation as well.
The texts are not fixed in blocks, between the words there are gaps, pauses, which influence the flow of reading and cause the text to take on visual qualities. This effect is underscored by the simple geometric forms that are composed around and above the text elements. The spatial arrangement is reflected in the materiality of the work. Each of the works consists of three layers of printed, transparent sheets, causing the stories to appear in a three-dimensional space and to construct a distance within themselves.
Sobral-Campos opens up divergent plots and commits herself to illogical turns. In tales of farcical misadventures she questions (social) norms as much as unquestioned prejudices and hierarchies. Gender categories get blurred, natural laws are mixed up, and boundaries are shifted and overrun.
Sobral-Campos has chosen a partner in this dialogue, August Sander, with whom she shares the passion for telling stories. His photo series People of the 20th Century consists of innumerable stories that emerge in the viewers? heads while looking at the images. Sobral-Campos?s interest is focused on portraits of women, outsiders who find themselves again on the margins of society due to non-conforming lifestyles and refusing social conventions.
Between such diverse artistic positions, a dialogue unfolds about photography and its materials, about representation and narration, about marginal phenomena, and about bringing these things to light or breathing life into them.