#2 Double-Faced Imagery - A Fugue
Dienstag, 24. März 2015 - 19:00 Uhr
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Willem Oorebeek, Evelyn Plaschg, Nicole Prutsch, Liddy Scheffknecht, Hui Ye
25th of April - 16th of May, 2015
Opening: Firday, 24th of April, 2015, 7 pm
What constitutes our Self and how is this Self defined and influenced by the image that we render of it to the outside world, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the image that is delivered by the printed medium or any other reproductive medium, such as photography or film?
This exhibition engages with precisely these mediated and thus biased imagistic processes, as well as with the technology that underpins the production of that same imagery: the dot matrix or the raster, the grid, the screen, the pixel?each per se an empty unit, without content other than itself, but at the same containing a potential, the potential of the image to come. How does this image relate to the actual persona that actually becomes virtual and unreal with its depiction in any medium whatsoever? The accumulation of dots, raster-dots, the flow of pixels play a basso continuo, form a subliminal, repetitive, monotone, enchanting rhythm of voices?so it is a fugue. Ultimately constituting, in a golem-like transformation, a somebody?our protagonists in the show.
Let us assemble in this space of floating images/portrayals and smallest entities, which carry us back to the naissance of a hybrid and vibrant subjectivity in an allegorical theater of the 21st century?s inhabitants: there are the portraits in ink, slightly digitally altered and subsequently inkjet-printed, by Evelyn Plaschg, resembling someone real, yet at the same time uncannily emptied out. There is Boy or Anonymous created by Willem Oorebeek, found images taken from magazines and assembled to form what he calls the Vertical Club, a constantly mutating and expanding family of images or characters, an assemblage initiated in 1994 and still ongoing. Boy is accompanied by a text referring back to Heinrich von Kleist?s Das Marionettentheater [On the Marionette Theater], which poses the question of how the most sublime and natural beauty can be achieved, whether by posing with the unconsciousness of a child or with the absolute control and self-awareness of a god-like figure. In Anonymous, the boyish girl shows as a hybrid, artificial personality, maybe, as Oorebeek asks, together ?with the girlish boy a perfect outlook on an urban future??.
Adopting a different yet similar approach, Hui Ye in The moment I saw me generates, via a mesmerizing double projection, the picture of a subject in continuous motion, always missing itself and finally encountering itself in a duplication situation where the figure is on the platform, while being in the train at the same time – a graceful and subtle parable of a nomadic being in search of itself.
A similar urban protagonist is to be found in Liddy Scheffknecht?s skater Untitled (Mica), another urban flâneur, populating suburban territories and persecuted by its own shadow, again a tricky perceptual operation that functions by projecting the imperceptibly moving shadow like a haunted revenant, producing an uncanny presence.
What links together these monads of present day under constant scrutiny and surveillance, for example to a potentially pre-eugenic experiment by the anthropologist Josef Szombathy who made anthropometric photographs of Viennese women at the end of the 19th century? Some of the women seem not to conform to the normative posture and assume various hard to define poses, set between resonating art historical ?pathos formulae? but sometimes escaping this norm by an indefinable counter-pose. Exactly this deviation is at the centre of Nicole Prutsch's investigation in Fremdkörper, where she marks the aberrations of the poses with colors from the printing process (CMYK) and translates these into a circular diagram, which brings us back to the raster-dot, alluding to the imagery of the ?quantified self?.
Hui Ye in a recent work How far is it? uses exactly these means of scrutiny in measuring her body centimeter by centimeter, accompanying her voyage with her voice monotonously counting each unit of measurement of her body.
Beyond all this we perceive a subliminal, almost imperceptible random sound of pins in ?it was so quiet that the pins dropped could be heard?,? composed by electronic musician Hui Ye.
Curated by Sabine Folie
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"Is it going well?" - The Dance
In unserer dritten und letzten Veranstaltung widmen wir uns dem Partyinhalt und den FUN der möglicherweise notwendig ist um einen belebten artist-run-space zu erhalten.