BERLIN.- At the same time Ralf Schmerberg started making films twenty years ago he decided not to work on photographic commission any longer. A commissioned photograph always comes with external expectations – both aesthetically and conceptually. The resulting images then have to oblige to this external concept whereas Ralf Schmerberg wanted to use photography as his own personal medium. For him, photography was the perfect tool to document the things and people that meet his eye during his travels and everyday encounters and make a visual diary.
Without thinking in terms of a photographic series or an entitlement to a certain aesthetic exclusivity in mind, he has since then followed the simple impetus to record with his camera those things that shake him emotionally.
Unaffected by external or his own expectations Ralf Schmerberg has managed to accumulate a vast archive of images over the years. In the exhibition „AugenscHmERZ“ at
pavlov’s dog he will show a selection of this very personal chronicle in a specifically composed arrangement.
On two opposing walls, Ralf assembles photographs that symbolically show both the bright side of life as well as life’s underbelly. The images represent both the joyous, hopeful and the dark and gloomy aspect of human emotions.
In Western society, negative things and feelings are to be suppressed as optimism and geniality are expected of the meritocratic member of society. With his photographs Ralf Schmerberg manages to make the viewer realise that both of these ostensibly opposing dimensions depend on and penetrate each other in their own truths. As the typography of title of the exhibition suggests: The German word pain (Schmerz) includes the word for heart (Herz), meaning that there’s no light without darkness, no fear without hope or vice versa. [But Ralf Schmerberg’s photographs are certainly not an eyesore (which would be the literal translation of the title)].
Self-taught filmmaker and artist Ralf Schmerberg manifested an unconventional stance from a young age and has since consistently always gone his own way. Schmerberg dropped out of school at 17 to live at the Indian philosopher Bhagwan’s ashram in Poona (India) and Oregon for five years. Since then, he has been chronicling his encounters with the world around him with an incisive and candid gaze through photography and film. His photography, films and multifaceted live art projects offer unexpected portraits of the zeitgeist, while the personal photo diary he has been keeping for the past two decades constitutes an evolving autobiographical record.
In 2008, Schmerberg founded the art collective Mindpirates, who, with their active presence and community-oriented projects, have become a staple in the cultural life of Berlin. Over the course of his career, Schmerberg has increasingly invested his creative enthusiasm into mobilizing large groups of people into modern forms of participatory art events that combine social exchange and action. Projects like dropping knowledge or The Table of Free Voices, or films like Problema or Poem for instance all opened up a large-scale dialogue and sustained reflection.
