STADTNOMADEN, 2002-11
Lambda prints
laminated on Aludibond
73 x 100 cm
Edition 5 + 2 AP
View:
Künstlerhaus Schloss
Wiepersdorf, 2006
The actors in these photographs are international artists whom I met during my fellowship residencies.
In this way, the photographs function, on the one hand, as portraits of the colleagues with reference to their respective artistic working methods and, on the other hand, are at the same time links to my own drawing-installation works that were created during these periods. Two aspects are an immanent part of the direction: the selection of the background and the interaction with a jointly selected object, which mostly also functions as an installation object within the framework of my work.
Artists* are comparable to nomads, as they move from grant to grant, from exhibition to exhibition, from project to project, in order to be able to live and work artistically.
1 Jiří Surůvka 2 Fumiko Kobayashi 3 Maxi Obexer
4 Ofra Lapid 5 Filipa César 6 Yitzhak Laor
Rainer Hoffmann describes the philosophical and art historical dimension of these works in his text Passagen-Werke on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the Galerie im Saalbau in 2010.
The term “urban nomads”, with which Susanne Britz titles a series of photographs, unites contradictory things. Archaic pictorial scenes of nomads wandering from oasis to oasis in the deserts are conjured up, images of inhospitable, deserted and hostile stretches of land that stand in contrast to urban space, to orderly purposeful systems, created by human hands for human beings.
Contextual shifts between activity and environment create sceneries that have a bizarre, surreal effect. […]
The action space, narrowly limited in all dimensions – towards the foreground, to the sides and in the picture-filling background – becomes a stage on which the acting persons act like actors. Their activities, which would not be worth mentioning in a corresponding environment, take on a gestural-abstract significance within this framework.
Excerpt from: Passagen-Werke: Der Gehsteig als Transitort by Rainer Hoffmann, catalog Raumgänger for the exhibition by Susanne Britz, Galerie Saalbau, Berlin, 2010