Dr. Monika Faber
The camera cuts through time and space inevitably by choosing the moment of the photograph and the perspective. Each photographic picture splits the river of time, separates a ‘before’ from an ‘afterwards’, that are not represented. The enclosed image space refuses its surroundings, simply cuts them off.
Friedl Kubelka’s work is a continual discourse with these immanent specifications of the photographic medium – here in the retrospective, which encompasses so much of what she has not yet shown, it becomes particularly clear. The fact that most of her work is directed at first sight against these restrictions, that they speak of waiving such obligations and exclusions, lets her preoccupation become only the more clearer.
Friedl Kubelka’s most well-known works, the Daily or Yearly Portraits, almost insist on evading the pressure of the non-recurrent moment, the singularity of the time of the photograph, through repetition.
By their sequencing the individual photographs win a temporal dimension, it seems. But pictures that are created one after the other do not result in a film – and a report” with its suspense-creating moments”