Juliane Duda and Simon Menner
space untitled
January 17 - February 21, 2009
Opening
Friday, January 16, 7-10pm
    
The exhibition ‚space untitled’ is about nameless places and their special presence at the edge of society.
Juliane Duda takes pieces of imagery out of individual videostills to assemble her images. The compositions are nearly logical, but not entirely, so that a moment of disorientation almost inevitably follows. The images show distortions, pixelations and artifacts – structures, that reflect various media, but also the idea of interference and malfunction. Duda’s video recordings almost always originate in the Eastern part of Germany and tendentially in places that are forgotten, abandoned and inaccessible.
Simon Menner’s works also thematize inaccessibility. His large-scale photographs document in a classical-documentary way the quiet nightlife of nameless streets in the metropolis Chicago in the North-Eastern U.S. Simon Menner is not concerned with glitzy fassades or their representational surfaces, however, but with what takes place in the background. His focus of attention is on the endlessly long alleys behind the buildings, that actually don’t have a name and that are used for the most part only by garbage trucks and other service companies. These places exist, brightly lit, in the middle of the city, yet lead a mere shadowy existence.
Common to both bodies of work is a similar use of the central perspective, that pulls the gaze increasingly to the center of the image, without representing the essential content there. With Juliane Duda one finds oneself in a distorted, visually heightened space, where reality in general, including one’s own, is tipped over into a new self-understanding. Simon Menner’s use of perspective, on the other hand, in taking one’s gaze to a tiny spot in the middle of the image, eventually leads to the opposite effect. One loses one’s orientation, so that a sense of uniformity seems to be clinging to everything in the image, making it appear almost abstract.
A postcard edition with 2 images will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.
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