Opening: Monday, September 9, 2024, 7 p.m.
Introductory words: Petra Noll-Hammerstiel
The artworks in the exhibition deal with the relationship between interior and exterior spaces in both an architectural and a mental sense. Architectural space can be understood as a stable sheltered space and a safe haven, but also as a place that isolates people from the outside world. Windows, as facilitators of light and air as well as a scopic relationship to the exterior, expand the spatial potential. Or the view is deliberately hindered with opaque glass. The boundary between inside and outside is freely adjustable. Natural spaces open up the view to the far distance and tend to promote self-reflective contemplation in the emotionally affected viewer. From the gaze outwards to the inward gaze. The inverse title of the exhibition indicates both the unconventional approach of the artists as well as special perceptual experiences. Fragmentation, emptiness, immateriality, blurriness or displacement characterise the places presented in the works. These spaces are heterogeneous and thus alive. The images are mostly abstract, painterly, ephemeral. Reality and fiction intermingle; light and colour do their part too.
The photo exhibited by Hélène Fauquet is one of a series of images of decorative, leaded stained glass windows from Art Nouveau and Art Deco. These were processed and printed on thin wooden panels using ultraviolet light. On closer inspection, the wood’s grain and knots are visible. They are all privacy screens which allow neither a view to the outside nor to the inside. They stand for withdrawal into a private (visually-protected) space that hinders any public gaze and is thus both control and prevented social contact. Furthermore, these leaded glass windows bathe the room in a painterly light and transfigure reality. These opaque, multi-coloured surfaces and greatly fragmented motifs lead to an additional blurring of the realities in front of and behind the windows. The borders between inside and outside disappear. Because of the fact that we are not dealing with actual windows but photos, seeing and not seeing also become discursive issues.
Liesbet Grupping’s artistic work consists of the process of looking at things – impressions, natural and ephemeral phenomena as well as the observation that emerges of those. Through the very undertaking of observing thoroughly she questions the (inherent) ability (of an image) to evoke a certain reality and by extension a certain understanding. She constructs images on the basis of (well-established) concepts and deconstructive methodologies in which the erratic and subjective intervene. Untitled (Beauregard) from the series bleu, blue, blauw, mėlyna, where the focus is on time, light, space, chance and inference, is made by a nightlong recording of the (blue) sky – an abstract, poetic photo, whose deep, dark blue colour is the result of a photographic failure of discoloration, which is caused by an exposure that took too long. And the photos from the series Alba, which show mountain ridges and plateaus in the Alps, lose their usual contoures due to overexposure of the sky or snow. Photography can make visible what we cannot see with the naked eye.
Bernát Haupt presents the 9-part series Photogon. Underneath his temporary home in Tallinn, Estonia, there was a cave-like structure, a place without recognizable purpose. Each day he “encountered” this space, it felt different to him. It was not the walls that had changed, but the perceiver himself. In order to capture these undefined contacts, he restructured the space by stitching the image with white yarn. Man-made structures are meant to be stable, a fixed point that can always be relied upon. The urge to feel connected to something static is driven by the longing not to feel lost. The inanimate world stores the memory of the living. Revisiting these places helps us to measure change and allows us to reflect on ourselves.
Based on the prevailing cultural-historical narrative that encompasses the Austrian mountain resort Semmering – the former mundane summer and spa destination for the Viennese bourgeoisie at the end of the 19th century – the film Elements of a Landscape by Laura Nitsch and Barbara Juch interweaves both fictional and documentary material and locates its story in the year 2020. The focus is on the Grand Hotel Panhans. Strolling through the hotel and its surrounding landscape, we follow two seasonal tour guides who work in short-term, seasonal employment. Listening to their increasingly uncanny stories, it becomes evident that the two women seem to know more than they can know, and they seem to comment on things that they might not be allowed to refer to. Playing with the seductiveness of tour-guide language and the common understanding of the landscape through which we move, the film asks how such a multi-layered topography is constructed and what will remain of its elements in the near future.
Esra Oezen‘s understanding of space is based on an affinity for emptiness, repetition and apparent disappearance. Her photograph Recording can be understood as a view from a window. “The photograph shows: Two hands holding an open book. On the pages of the book is: the reproduction of a scan. Scanned: an unexposed yet developed negative.This journey through various media, which begins with a depcitive photograph and ends with a photograph that refuses depiction, should appear impenetrable due to its many intermediate stops, but the result is so clear in form and seemingly so unequivocal in content that viewers have to take their time to develop any questions directed at it all. Esra Oezen’s Recording is so unimpassioned that one runs the risk of missing it, even though it questions many modes of representation and perception and challenges us to reflect on them: The intimacy of the situation depicted, clearly produced for the camera; the implicit weight of the printed book, in which then nothing is revealed; the impression of a non-event (…).“ (Lino Heissenberg)
Kai Werner Schmidt’s works of the series Squares, each consist of a black-and-white collage of photographs of unidentified sections of buildings that for him are associated with power. In contrast to the others, the Squares VI image is different because there is no obvious connection to architecture. Here, Schmidt’s camera was directed at the pathways and squares in and around various (power) places, so the impression created is an abstract one. In the aluminium framework there are two glass fragments behind security glass. The glass thus intrudes into part of the visual space of both image and reality. Schmidt’s inspiration for the Squares series came from one specific (power) place: the chapel of a historical prison where, shortly before it was renovated, an art exhibition was presented that he took part in. The photo, Promising, shows the branch of an apple tree, thereby linking idealistic beauty with transience. It refers to an exchange of letters with a former prisoner.
Petra Noll-Hammerstiel
Audio guide of the exhibition:
