NEW YORK, NY.- Thomas Erben Gallery presents (Re)Set, an exhibition including works by Hans-Peter Feldmann, Niklas Goldbach, Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Elaine Stocki, as well as a collaboration between Kathrin Sonntag and Nina Hoffmann. Working with photography and video, these artists employ various strategies to explore, reevaluate, and reorganize troves of images. Sensitively attuned to the contemporary condition of accelerated image production, consumption, and obsolescence, the presented works embrace this condition and use it as a source to generate meaning.
Elaine Stocki’s carefully staged and formally luscious images of nude women carrying abstract paintings visit the aesthetics of 1970s-era performance documentation, combining that genre’s relationship to the provisional with a thoughtful, even classical approach to photography. Relaxing her previously stringent editing process, Stocki’s accumulation of images allows for a greater degree of insight into the performative genesis of these photographs as well as her parallel painting practice.
Working in reverse order, Niklas Goldbach looks for correspondences within a multitude of his photographs, editing quadriptychs of, for example: a natural landscape, part of a sculpture by Sir Lawes-Wittewronge, Brutalist architecture, and a dystopian contemporary cityscape. His images connect the utopian logic in Modernist architecture to its disintegration under the rules of global Capitalism. Akin to endless surveillance videos, Goldbach’s existential reflection The Nature of Things No.1 (2011), an unedited 3 ½ hour video, records a young man who is bonded to a tree trunk, enduring time as well as the vagaries of weather, insects, and other disturbances.
For their collaborative slide projection Ein Bild (An Image), Nina Hoffmann and Kathrin Sonntag went through their extensive photographic archives, each pairing one photograph based on categories devised together. These categories make visible an essential part of the artistic process, and one specific to photography: looking, selecting, and often discarding. Thoughtful, funny, and sometimes uncanny, these so-called useless images and the categories that sort them, such as “A picture I took because I was bored”, make us think about how we see and how we establish visual hierarchies.
In his Time series from the early 1970s, Hans-Peter Feldmann set up a premise for his neither explicitly photographic nor documentarian, casually shot photographs. The exhibited pictures were taken while the artist traveled across a bridge or along a pond bordered by a palace, using up an entire roll of film on each occasion in an attempt to contain the passage of time. “I also think individual photos are not right for me. I find them too loaded with meaning, too elitist. The mood of a whole series is more important than an individual picture. When things are repeated, then there’s an average value that’s more correct than an individual picture can be.” – Hans-Peter Feldmann in a conversation with Kaspar König (Frieze Magazine, No. 91, May 2005).
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller carefully collage sequences from the immense repository of mainstream cinema to lay bare underlying social constructs and filmic conventions while introducing multiple layers of meaning. In Maybe Siam (2009), actors portray blind characters who are trying to maneuver through interior spaces while noisily bumping into furniture, groping for door handles, and dropping objects that clatter to the ground. Yet these scenes are silent, as the accompanying sound has been transposed onto intercut segments of blank black screen, emulating the experience of blindness. At some point during these alternating sequences of seeing/not seeing, Faraway Places begins to play – a melancholic song about a longing to see distant lands that serves as a bittersweet confirmation of the dependency on and limitation to imagination, both for our protagonists and for us as viewers.
