3 February – 9 April 2007

WORDS AND THINGS

Alexander Gutke, Annette Kelm, Susanne Kriemann, Matthias Meyer, Christopher Williams

Words and things have a somewhat arbitrary relationship to one another. Any thinking about the constitution of language incorporates therefore thinking about the cognition of reality, images and things. How do language and systems of categorization determine reality and the portrayal of reality? Is our perception governed by what we think we know? In his book The Order of Things, the original title of which translating as »Words and Things«, the French philosopher Michel Foucault investigates different historical systems of classification with regard to ways in which the »world« is apprehended.
The group exhibition »Words and Things« features a series of photographs and films by international artists, who, in the broadest sense possible, engage in with questions of representation and show how aesthetic and cultural meaning often emanates primarily from the interpretation of images.

Susanne Kriemann's photographs for example, direct their attention towards apparently incidental scenes, which are either charged with meaning or are suggestive of such. They depict a zone of insecurity, in which objects or architectural details appear to speak of contexts that remain external to photography and that cannot be divined from the title. On the contrary, the title assimilates itself into the composition as well, like a further suggestive level of commentary.
Her photographs often appear as though collaged-different levels of reality seem to be layered one after another. And yet there has been no manipulation on Kriemann's part. A number of motifs look as though they were taken in the 60s or 70s. Reality penetrates these images from the periphery inwards in the form of incidental details, which refer to the present day. This shifting or dislocation is also of interest to Susanne Kriemann, not only from the perspective of depicting the historical element in monuments, but also those ephemeral moments of our historically-amnesic present day.

Annette Kelm's photographs are characterized by a reflective use of the medium. Often presented as a series, her works investigate the status of photography as a visual system of meaning capable of generating aesthetically ambivalent symbols. It is precisely the clarity-supposedly indelible in her compositions-that proves to be a disturbance to existing systems of classification, creating meaning in the superimposition of different symbols.
The isolated nature of the object, so rich in associations, and the sculptural form of the arrangement consciously leave viewers to their own devices. The context of what is being shown is not immediately apparent at first glance, yet the images are nonetheless extremely eloquent. With these motifs arranged as they are in a series, comparative observation itself-or indeed the charging of things-become the object of focus, revealing the significance of what is being represented in an interplay of divergence and repetition.

Thoughts about the relationship between photography and the things being photographed, viz. the object and its description, find a conceptual formulation in the photographs of Christopher Williams, who is himself almost a figure reference in this context. By means of inserting subtle, disturbances into seemingly objective depictions, he defamiliarizes them and reveals their ideological or epistemological charge, ultimately designating any objective rendering of reality an illusion. For Williams, photography implies equally the history of the medium as well as the fields in which it is chiefly employed, such as documentation, advertising, leisure and politics.

Matthias Meyer's videos in turn make use of existing film material by subjecting them to minimal yet significant alteration. »The Black Museum« is based upon Nicolas Philibert's documentary film »La Ville Louvre« , which takes a look behind the scenes at a museum. All the paintings appearing in the film have been coloured black by Meyer. Characterized by the aesthetics of negation deriving its potential from the absurdity of the black paintings, the museum becomes thus a suprematistic masterpiece. The restorers, curators and other employees treat each painting as a »window on the world«, even it remains closed for us.

Finally, Alexander Gutke's »Exploded View« demonstrates a machine-created visibility, which, for its part, presents the aesthetics of an apparatus. A total of 81 slides of a Kodak slide projector show details of the insides of the apparatus. Nor is the element of explicit self-reference is by any means hermetic; instead, the mysterious secret life of the machine proves to be more a pictorial world of its own, transforming thus our view of other forms of reproduced figurativeness.