19 October 2008 - 11 January 2009

IAN WALLACE

Alongside Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum Ian Wallace (*1943) is among the protagonists of conceptual photography from Vancouver. As professor at the University of British Columbia he taught amongst others Jeff Wall. While his works are in the collections of leading museums in Canada and the USA, he is yet little known in Europe. The starting point of his work is in abstract painting evocative of Minimal Art. But from the late 1960s on it is the medium of photography that largely affects his artistic practice. Therewith connected are profound issues of the status of the image, its representational function, its political and social implications and its shift in meaning when in an art context.

THE PERCEPTION OF IDEAS LEADS TO NEW IDEAS

Bernadette Corporation / Claire Fontaine / Reena Spaulings, Kerstin Cmelka, Claire Fontaine, Iain Forsyth / Jane Pollard, Joachim Koester, Jon Knowles, Jonathan Monk, Falke Pisano, Mario Garcia Torres

»Perception of ideas leads to new ideas« is No. 21 in Sol Le Witt's famous sentences on Conceptual Art. The nine artists participating in the exhibition have originated works which can in turn be classed as »re-makes« of works dating from the 1960s and 70s. They extend beyond a loose referentiality and adopt concrete examples of works from the historical genre of conceptual art in order to endow them with a specific, contemporary slant.

ESKE SCHLÜTERS

The Similar and the Possible - Levels of Enactment

Using individual and multiple filmic projections, Eske Schlüters (*1970) investigates the »understanding« of moving pictures and cinematic sequences, which are themselves not governed by a tight narrative structure. Her open narrative method plays upon conceptual thinking, disturbs it discovering new meaning. Schlüters' projections experiment with found material and as such constitute an interplay of words, sounds and images redolent of their metaphorical character and the »bigger picture« or context, which has been lost from view. By exclusively using cinematic material from other directors' films, Schlüters is writing a personal history of film in which fleeting instances of complex atmospheres come into being. No longer integral to a given narrative framework, the images speak for themselves. They are not quotations but memories of something that has been seen that can no longer be unequivocally recapitulated.

16 February – 20 April 2008

Ulla von Brandenburg

Where there is a network of red over the green

Ulla von Brandenburg uses a variety of media - drawings and silhouettes are juxtaposed with wall paintings, works in cloth with 16 mm films. Her works refer to older, inherently expressive or theatrical conventions of representation, such as tarot cards and early photography, but also tableaux vivants and funfair sensations. Von Brandenburg adapts the poses and gestures of these representations or perhaps a theatrical quality, which examines the relationship of appearance and reality in abstract manner. In so doing she is less interested in adopting existing content than in formal staging, which exposes a wealth of cultural and representational patterns of interpretation. She traces social behavioural patterns, rules and rituals without giving them concrete expression. The bias towards the ornamental, which characterises many of her designs, is geared more to the delineation of representative patterns of order, which can be transferred to the individual and society. Moreover, von Brandenburg's often historically inspired motifs function by means of their transference to a current temporal mode of reference, rather like a filter placed between representation and reception. It is precisely the inherent ambiguity of the scenarios that turn the viewer into an accomplice in the assumed act of deciphering.