UNFOLD

Opening: Monday, 2 December, 7 p.m.
Opening speech: Johan Nane Simonsen

“As the story unfolds” is an expression often used to describe how historical events seemingly develop out of their own internal logic. It suggests that a story only opens up gradually, becoming incrementally visible. This is not a story with a linear development: it has wrinkles and unfolds, again and again, it repeats, as Karl Marx said, once as tragedy then as farce. But what happens when the repetitions are endless, like a vortex that sucks us in? We try to understand the system of superimposed historical layers that comprises our present, to smooth the chaos, but does that really end with a unified whole? Or do we continue unfolding in a kind of endless spiral until finally realising that the centre is empty? UNFOLD encourages us to follow up on this question. The exhibition concerns formal, topographic folds, but first of all with the complex layers of socio-political and geopolitical processes that shape our lives. The works in this show are not invitations to passive viewing but to actively “unfold” them.

Urban development and gentrification leave their mark on city environments but seldom so strongly as the Belgrade Waterfront in the Serbian capital. Since 2015 this large-scale project, financed by the Eagle Hills investor group, has transformed the urban landscape with enormous glass-and-steel buildings. It dominates Belgrade’s city planning both economically and visually. Julia Gaisbacher documents the transformations from 2017 to 2022 in One Day You Will Miss Me. Her photographic portraits show the status quo and Belgrade’s architectural changes. Over the years the work became an archive and a visual metaphor for global urban and political change.

Herbert Hofer’s works often deal with superimpositions, spaces and various points of view. This is based on his distrust of simple, uncommented statements. He considers perception to be something unstable that is determined by biological, psychological, political and social influences. At the same time he harbours a desire to expand the borders of what he can imagine. Superimpositions and changes preserve the original aspects of reality but lead to a new way of seeing. The work group raumfalte consists of large-scale photos of Hofer’s studio. They are printed on aluminium and crumpled so that they are free-standing in the exhibition space.

Conversations about the weather (Schirokko) by Lukas Matuschek is based on digital conversations especially about photos exchanged in a group chat. The series shows a group of Greek islands photographed during a sandstorm by a friend who was sailing in the region. The Saharan wind blowing from Africa to Europe changes the landscape it encounters similar to smog. It shrouds the natural landscapes and cityscapes in a hazy cloud that blurs edges and renders details unrecognisable. The sand particles carried on the wind distort familiar points of orientation, they appear ethereal as if seen in the mist. The composition emphasises the wind’s transformative power and the silhouette of the island is only vaguely recognisable, as a memory, so to speak, of the photographic origins of the large-format image.

Ziad Naitaddi encountered people in exile and migrants whose stories shape his work and reflect changes in the emotional landscapes. His art is concerned with identity, homeland and emotional transformation and is inspired by the Indian philosopher, Homi K. Bhabha. Using visual “surgery”, Naitaddi reduces images to pixels which become political narratives. His calculated simulation of changes in reality is aimed at manipulating emotions. His art poses the question: “What is revealed when we go beyond the picture’s limits and freeze time?” Ziad shows that in the manipulation of movement and emotion memories and experiences emerge that transcend what is directly tangible.

Using found footage and personal videos, Ksenia Yurkova’s Easter is an analysis of the discursive eclecticism and the new political eschatology of modern Russia. This turns out to be the ideological justification for the military invasion of Ukraine, especially the so-called “denazification” – a mirror image of the increasingly fascist Russia. The work examines the foundations for this new doctrine of war and is formally constructed as a speculative polyphony of voices of the older generation of artists. A central link here is Yurkova’s grandmother from Mariupol. She had Jewish-Greek-Ukrainian origins but escaped the Nazis. The paradoxes of language can be seen in the contrast with the found footage and the artist’s own video sequences that reflect the pathos of ideological tragedies and the grotesque belief in reality.

Petra Noll-Hammerstiel and Johan Nane Simonsen