RUTH HOMMELSHEIM | Urban Notations [Wuhan]

Opening: Friday, 27 November 2009, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 28 November - 19 December 2009

Urban Notations [Wuhan] is part of a long-term research project on urbanity. It represents an analysis of the city based on experience. For her exhibition at Loris, Ruth Hommelsheim has produced an installation with a spatial context, in which a photographic ribbon runs through the gallery, interrupted at irregular intervals by illuminated boxes. Urban Notations [Wuhan] was created during a trip to China this year. 

Urban Notations [Wuhan] is a multidimensional collage indicating as it unravels that a single individual, whether resident or visitor, can never overlook the city in its entirety. Urbanity is in fact a complex relational network of actions. Apart from the manifold traces of history that overlap in contemporary urban space, each moment in the present contains countless images and incidents. 

The artist makes use of the situationist technique of roaming and immersing herself in the rivers of the city and their photographic notation. This in turn allows access to the photographic technique of superimposing: Hommelheim emphasizes the multiplicity of contemporary urbanity, one that cannot be reduced to a system of signs but is rather understood as an expression of the performative production of everday life. 

The film-like movement through the city is projected as an artform into the room: a photographic ribbon comparable to a 35mm film emerges and is traced across the walls of the gallery. The continuity of the ribbon is punctuated by illuminated boxes that, on the one hand, form an architectural element in the flow of the ribbon and, on the other hand, heighten the specific characteristic of film materiality.