OPEN SPACE 18 | 11 ISSUES | DISPLAyCING THE PRESENT

with works by Sophie Aigner, Oliver Dignal, Paulina Gimpel, Standard Euro, Ulrike Hannemann, Andy Heller, Ruth Hommelsheim, Werner Huthmacher, Ulrike Kolb, Oliver Krebs, Nina Wiesnagrotzki  

Opening: Friday, 24.04.2015, 7 pm

Exhibition: 25.04.–23.05.2015

Opening Hours Gallery Weekend 01.–03.05.2015, Fri 2–9 pm, Sat/Sun 11 am–7 pm

A text like the one before you is supposed to arouse an interest, introduce to an exhibition, and place the viewer in a position. Too often, however, compelling bridge building into the exhibition context that it is, it is capable of no more than representing an odd passage, of laying out a track into the exhibition and between the exhibits the viewer merely has to follow. Yet, purposefully, this track would imply a terminal point.

Staying with the image of bridge building, photography is thus quite the manifestation of an in-between. According to perspective it stems itself, downright indiscernible yet in its form so very tangible, between the prior and the afterwards, making the present depictable in the first place. Roland Barthes, coming to bear here as he does so often, already outlined the catastrophe (1) represented by photography in this temporal constant replication – hand on hand, on hand, on hand etc. Since by way of a photograph the painful awareness may result of how thoroughly it, the photograph, has at the moment of its genesis already usurped the present, thus being evidence of all bridges to what took place now pulled down or going to collapse, respectively.

DISPLAyCING THE PRESENT honestly attempts to describe not some exhibition circuit to be paced off in the direction of something conclusive, but one to be traced along its brittle edges in order to carry fragments over to the next venue, to check rudiments for proper fit, to track down, or divide apart, what is connected.

(1) “What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself, She is going to die: I shudder ... over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subjectis already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography