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Sebald (a glossary to an exhibition)
Almost black and white
The simple beauty of white letters on black. And their reverse, black text passages on a white ground. Not really black and white but shades of grey and cream, if you look closely enough.
There are no black and white photographs here.
Archive
Potentially, there’s no end to the archive, and, in this, it is similar to the ever-growing web. It protects and keeps whatever you assign to it. It is also about a process.
The archive is ordered and flexible. Multiple references and relationships are possible. The archive doesn’t draw attention to itself but it has its own mystery, since you don’t necessarily notice how precious its contents are.
The boxes forming part of the installation archive also stand for the idea of the library which is implied in the book objects featured, as well as in the texts in diverse languages – the original and its translations, the printed book and its Xeroxed page. They stand for a taxonomy allowing for retrieval, the ordering process and order itself, and they represent objects from the past. At the same time, they represent history and eternal presence.
The box in gleaming white contains the sheet which presents the photograph and the text like a precious miniature.
The show itself as imaginary archive, as a contradiction in terms: a temporary place of keeping something forever.
Beauty
The soft yellow light spreading from a lampshade. The dynamics of the line created by the cheap little lamp's glow on the wall of the hotel room. The symmetry of the double light cone. The symmetry, ever so slightly imperfect. What's left of the wall is hidden in shadow; not black, though – here's another flat panel in yellow, its hues ranging from almost white to almost brown.
Colour
The bright red demands total attention. It dominates its surroundings completely. It suffers no other presence but itself. It forces the eye to comply and enter the shiny reflecting surface.
The muted shades of green exact this attention, too, but in a different way: They take it for granted. Their sight instills calmness in the viewer’s eye, and the eye, while not immediately recognizing the objects they represent, loves them. Only after scanning the surface does the impact of the shimmering object manifest itself.
Elegance
The two-dimensional space seems divided in two.
The colours seem to be bleeding into each other.
The eye strains to recognize the layers of the image.
The vertical lines of the red curtain fabric intersected by the horizontal ones of the chair in blond wood.
Emotion
It is in the expression of a human's face or in a man or woman’s posture. It is created in the viewer's system when two colours clash or when two lines intersect at this point and no other.
The plot of a story drives tears to our eyes even if it is fragmentary or if its logic is absent. It may also do so because of it.
Joy and fear, desire and terror.
Emotion is distanced by various means: The English titles of individual images, the English meta texts of the projection. The English, French and Italian translations of the quotes referring to individual works. Sebald’s fictions in the shape of Japanese books.
The layout of the text quote on a ream of paper.
The faux red and yellow of stage design.
Exile
The man or woman who is exiled remembers forever the country, the language or the people they have lost. Suppressed or fictionalized memories are memories as well.
Hotel
Hotel rooms take on the guest who wishes to rest. He puts down his suitcase, opens it, removes a few things he needs right after arriving, and closes it again.
The glass of water refreshes him who has been tired and dehydrated from the long journey, although it couldn't even be really called all that long. But international borders had to be crossed, different levels of altitude had to be overcome, controls and unfriendly staff had to be suffered. He had barely been able to stand the sterility of the airport building, feeling claustrophobic, and he had hated the fact that he was either not allowed to smoke at all or just in the most unwelcoming, in the dirtiest, in the most hidden corners of the place.
The room is adequate, which means it offers no more and no less than a certain acceptable standard. Value for your money.
Now everything becomes quiet. In the circle of light provided by the lamp that corresponds to a certain standard – but no more and no less – the guest falls asleep.
Inspiration
Sebald: A German writer who writes novels about sufferers from melancholia and other illnesses, about potential suicides, lonely travellers, outsiders, emigrants, and holocaust victims, and he does so in a highly idiosyncratic style, building an endless maze of sentences interspersed with an outdated or downright bizarre vocabulary and inserting whole pages of quotes from Stendhal or Kafka. He writes about memories and false memories. About remembrance and loss.
Sebald: Who irritates his readers not just by writing strange texts halfway between fiction and non-fiction, but also by adding a layer of substandard, grainy black and white photographs and other pictures of realia, thus refusing explanation and even creating their opposite: confusion.
Sebald: The writer who, unerringly –
M.: Who, in 1998, in Los Angeles, first drew my attention to Sebald and made me read the English translations of two novels just come out in the US. Reading them becomes a source of utter fascination. Years later, I start juxtaposing passages from Sebald's texts and my own photographs. There's many a passage that becomes as closely attached as a friend.
Inspiration II
Calvino, whose urban visions in the shape of a strangely hybrid text appear in the early 70s. Who creates his own verbal nets full of allusions. Who, in his genre-breaking book The invisible cities, presents us with his mix of poetical language and the effects of strictly choosing and juxtaposing elements in a most sophisticated game.
Inspiration III
Roaming the contemporary city, searching for and slowly discovering the layers of time. In the most hands-on sense: relics on every wall, on every pavement, on almost every street sign.
Signs are everywhere. Not everyone sees them.
The eye reads the city and its pictorial riches: images old and new, innocuous and obscene, soothing and cruel, clean and dusty.
Obsessions: Searching and seeing.
The camera keeps something.
The camera and achieving the impossible: documenting that which grows and fades.
Installation
Photographs, texts and three-dimensional objects start to form an indissoluble alliance. The upward swing of the dead branches in the simple vase turn two photographs into the panels of a diptych. The pile of books refers to the related themes of reading and writing and to the author, who is not the man in the panel. The man who is visible to us from the back and who is not the author and, in other words, not Sebald but could easily be him, this man seems to be walking away from the viewer. The way he moves releases the eye from the spatial restrictions and into the work's surroundings.
Language
Language as a means of understanding, of interpretation. Language as a means of reflecting, analysing and distancing.
Language as a means of telling a story. Language as emotion encrusted.
Language as a sensual object, as a source of indulging one's senses.
Language as visual pleasure.
Language and image as equal partners, on the same level, with the same rights.
Light and shadow
The dead and brightly-lit branches reproduce themselves on the photograph where a weird tangle has been captured. At the same time their shadows physically cross the border of the frame and appear on the white wall. The shadows are twofold now, thus intriguing the viewer, who strains his eyes to tell the realities of space and surface apart.
The figure appears as if in the frame of a mirror. He or she studies closely something we can't see on the wall in front.
The figure disappears. What's left are the surroundings bathed in shadow and the arches painted by a soft light whose source is invisible to us.
The figure appears almost like a black shadow, but it isn't just that. We don't know if that person turns his or her gaze towards the viewers or away from us. What we get is the impression of someone who sees; we just don't know who or what the object of the seeing might be. It might be ourselves.
The figure disappears again.
Macro und Micro
An object is lying on a white surface. If you look closely you will notice another one lying behind it. It could be an egg, with a mysterious being about to escape from its shell almost cracked.
It could be a sculpture, made by an artist's hand.
Snow may have been falling. Black ice may have been forming on the ground.
Wings are spreading in delicate detail. They may be the tender branches of a conifer. They may be the legs of a spider. They may be a fragment of a blown-up feather.
Snow may have been falling.
Black ice may have been forming.
Material
The shiny surface of the paper challenges the artist to juxtapose paper and pictures whose colours it makes stand out, quotes or completes. It wants to be touched and appreciated.
The pencil-written passage from the text becomes one with the fabric, which is a special one.
The handmade product and the length of time it has taken to write on it hail of times long past.
The silver box storing the index cards, the gleaming white of the box and the paper focus the viewer's attention on the idea of something valuable but also on that of simple elegance.
The real branch doubles and triples the shadows in the picture photographed.
The real branch visually unites two photographs.
The real branch draws us into the work's sphere and turns us into players inside an installation.
Melancholia
The lonely wanderer by day and by night. Sleeplessness, a motif?
The man sitting alone at the table, oblivious to the world around him. Is he thinking about the journey just behind him, or is he already planning his next steps? The room is nicely bathed in warm hues, but the face and the silence are speaking a different language.
We can just about recognize the man leaving his house. Is he trying to escape, or is he looking for company? Is it the same man at all or a look-alike?
Subdued shades create a feeling of –
Memories
They may mean losing or gaining something. We can store them or suppress them.
We can include them in our personal archive. We can exclude them from it.
They never leave us cold.
They may be utterly fictional.
Mirrors and mirrorlike effects
The mirror allows us a glance into a darkened room, which seems to be a study. But who is studying here, and who is seeing?
The mirror shows a man who goes about his daily chores in a brightly-lit room. Will he turn round? And if he should do so, what or who will he see?
The mirror shows a man sitting at a table, meditating.
Whose doppelganger?
The picture mirrored seems to be that of a medieval town with steeples, half-timbered buildings and the decorative cobble stones of an Italian piazza. The red hue which is everywhere takes the distorted lines to an even higher degree of unreality and reminds the viewer of a fairy tale. The viewer gets the impression of standing in front of the entrance to another world.
Mysteries
A barely visible figure somewhere on the road. Going home, coming back from work or from a shopping trip. It may even be a simple case of sleeplessness.
It’s on a winter’s night, and apart from the vaguely noticeable figure, we see railings slowly emerging to the right and left, we see very broad steps defining the path leading down a hill, and a few moments later squares glowing red appear in the sky above: the windows of suburbia.
The wanderer stops in his tracks and glances back.
He gazes directly at the viewer. This is quite obvious, even if we don’t really see it.
The wanderer, who has been striding along rather energetically, is waiting. The outcome of this is completely in the dark. Somebody may be murdered. Somebody may have been murdered already. On the other hand, it is possible that nothing will happen at all.
It is possible
Night
A winter journey.
Non sequiturs, fragments, crops
The word which doesn’t mean a thing but appears in bold.
The text which is leading nowhere.
The word which is leading nowhere.
The quote which has lost its original context.
The crop of the human foot resting on the bed.
The lines intersecting.
The corner in the basement, which could be storage room as well as an office or an apartment.
The wall framed by the mirror.
Past, present, future
Cliché no. 1: The photograph is always something past already. It always points to something that has decayed. There are critics who say: In the final analysis, it is death itself.
Cliché no. 2: The photograph is always something present. There are critics who say: It is the ongoing moment, it is that reality which lasts forever.
Cliché no. 3: If the photograph is always present, this means that the future is always implied as well.
Question: -
Relationships
Between photographer and photographed, text and image, text and text, image and image, motif and composition. Between the work and its surrounding space. Between the work and its viewer. Nothing static.
The script
The traces written by the rain. Coincidence or no coincidence? Are they actually there or are our eyes simply deceived? Remembrance doesn't give us any clues.
The eye likes to believe whatever it believes to be seeing.
Sebald
W.G. Sebald, born 1944 in Wertach, Allgäu (Germany), died 2001 in a car accident following a supposed heart attack in Norfolk, England.
Sets
The set turns the individual photograph into the part of a whole. It focuses – or seems to focus – on one aspect of the individual work. It stresses something. It insinuates movement and provokes the viewer to move his or her gaze, which may be fluent or fragmentary. The individual work accepts its place as one amongst two or more images, but it doesn't lose anything.
The set, the whole work, doesn't exist without the individual photograph.
The set may be a series of stills.
The set may tell a story like a film does. It may portray protagonists, their relationships and experience. It may be a matter of life and death.
The set may be imaginary. Red, the beginning of an imaginary set called Red. Almost black and white – the beginning of an imaginary set of black and white photographs that are neither black nor white.
Space
Space means the staircase that the tenant quickly leaves behind, the hotel room where the exhausted traveller goes to bed right away, it means the apartment with the television switched on, the basement with the light entering through the window pane, making the viewer want to move in.
Space means the reversed world in the mirror, the back rooms of the empty theatre.
Space is the city the wanderer explores on foot; that the killer needs to find his victim, and that the victim needs to shelter.
Space is all that which lies between, above, below and next to the web's knots. It is the place where stories are told, and images are linked and where human beings relate; where dimensions change. Space offers chances.
Space is the meaning created between two or more pictures.
Space is the forum where every single object may occupy any place.
Space is the forum where every single object has its own well-defined place.
Space is time.
Stories
A man goes down a narrow, steep stair and turns a bend. He’s wearing a dark green coat and is about to leave his house. Or is he about to enter an apartment?
A man is sitting at a table. The expression on his face is pensive, almost bleak. He is sitting there, calmly, a perfect picture of introspection. How long is he going to stay like that?
A man in a light beige sweater is sitting at a round table. Next to him, piles of books and DVDs. An empty chair. A red curtain drawn open. We can look through and at the same time we can’t. Outside there seems to be a clear and bright day.
An empty chair. The red shade of a curtain drawn to. Outside there seems to be a clear and bright day.
A man is moving towards the back of a room. He is not alone.
The TV is switched on.
It is evening.
Text
Text stands in relation to the image. The text was written by a great German author named Sebald.
The text was written by a great Italian author named Calvino.
Reading created epiphanies, some just happening by accident, some by intention. Memories flashed and text passages found their corresponding photographs. The past as written found the past as captured. Who knows the rules?
Flashes in the mind
Text images
The white text on black ground, the black text on white ground: The emphasis is on individual words in larger print, thus making them lose their meaning, and turning them into flat objects. They invite the viewer to play. To continue weaving the web of words.
New stories come into existence that way.
New parts of a continuously growing web come into existence.
The traveller
The traveller enters the room for the first time and will never enter it again.
He will enter it again many more times.
The web
Everything is connected. Photographs to other photographs, photographs to texts, texts to photographs, and texts to other texts. The one is born from the other, without any logical cause but with a powerful inner consequence.
Everything is connected, but somehing new is being born all the time. The web creates itself by continuously adding more and more bits and pieces. Potentially, it never stops weaving and being woven, and only this very exhibition right here and now forces its temporary limitation.
The web, or net, is a woven entity. It means the opposite of imprisonment; it means freedom. It is endlesslessly growing.
© Sigrid Ehemann 2011
A guide to "Sebald - Photography / Collage / Installation", an exhibition in Düsseldorf, 2011.
The simple beauty of white letters on black. And their reverse, black text passages on a white ground. Not really black and white but shades of grey and cream, if you look closely enough.
There are no black and white photographs here.
Archive
Potentially, there’s no end to the archive, and, in this, it is similar to the ever-growing web. It protects and keeps whatever you assign to it. It is also about a process.
The archive is ordered and flexible. Multiple references and relationships are possible. The archive doesn’t draw attention to itself but it has its own mystery, since you don’t necessarily notice how precious its contents are.
The boxes forming part of the installation archive also stand for the idea of the library which is implied in the book objects featured, as well as in the texts in diverse languages – the original and its translations, the printed book and its Xeroxed page. They stand for a taxonomy allowing for retrieval, the ordering process and order itself, and they represent objects from the past. At the same time, they represent history and eternal presence.
The box in gleaming white contains the sheet which presents the photograph and the text like a precious miniature.
The show itself as imaginary archive, as a contradiction in terms: a temporary place of keeping something forever.
Beauty
The soft yellow light spreading from a lampshade. The dynamics of the line created by the cheap little lamp's glow on the wall of the hotel room. The symmetry of the double light cone. The symmetry, ever so slightly imperfect. What's left of the wall is hidden in shadow; not black, though – here's another flat panel in yellow, its hues ranging from almost white to almost brown.
Colour
The bright red demands total attention. It dominates its surroundings completely. It suffers no other presence but itself. It forces the eye to comply and enter the shiny reflecting surface.
The muted shades of green exact this attention, too, but in a different way: They take it for granted. Their sight instills calmness in the viewer’s eye, and the eye, while not immediately recognizing the objects they represent, loves them. Only after scanning the surface does the impact of the shimmering object manifest itself.
Elegance
The two-dimensional space seems divided in two.
The colours seem to be bleeding into each other.
The eye strains to recognize the layers of the image.
The vertical lines of the red curtain fabric intersected by the horizontal ones of the chair in blond wood.
Emotion
It is in the expression of a human's face or in a man or woman’s posture. It is created in the viewer's system when two colours clash or when two lines intersect at this point and no other.
The plot of a story drives tears to our eyes even if it is fragmentary or if its logic is absent. It may also do so because of it.
Joy and fear, desire and terror.
Emotion is distanced by various means: The English titles of individual images, the English meta texts of the projection. The English, French and Italian translations of the quotes referring to individual works. Sebald’s fictions in the shape of Japanese books.
The layout of the text quote on a ream of paper.
The faux red and yellow of stage design.
Exile
The man or woman who is exiled remembers forever the country, the language or the people they have lost. Suppressed or fictionalized memories are memories as well.
Hotel
Hotel rooms take on the guest who wishes to rest. He puts down his suitcase, opens it, removes a few things he needs right after arriving, and closes it again.
The glass of water refreshes him who has been tired and dehydrated from the long journey, although it couldn't even be really called all that long. But international borders had to be crossed, different levels of altitude had to be overcome, controls and unfriendly staff had to be suffered. He had barely been able to stand the sterility of the airport building, feeling claustrophobic, and he had hated the fact that he was either not allowed to smoke at all or just in the most unwelcoming, in the dirtiest, in the most hidden corners of the place.
The room is adequate, which means it offers no more and no less than a certain acceptable standard. Value for your money.
Now everything becomes quiet. In the circle of light provided by the lamp that corresponds to a certain standard – but no more and no less – the guest falls asleep.
Inspiration
Sebald: A German writer who writes novels about sufferers from melancholia and other illnesses, about potential suicides, lonely travellers, outsiders, emigrants, and holocaust victims, and he does so in a highly idiosyncratic style, building an endless maze of sentences interspersed with an outdated or downright bizarre vocabulary and inserting whole pages of quotes from Stendhal or Kafka. He writes about memories and false memories. About remembrance and loss.
Sebald: Who irritates his readers not just by writing strange texts halfway between fiction and non-fiction, but also by adding a layer of substandard, grainy black and white photographs and other pictures of realia, thus refusing explanation and even creating their opposite: confusion.
Sebald: The writer who, unerringly –
M.: Who, in 1998, in Los Angeles, first drew my attention to Sebald and made me read the English translations of two novels just come out in the US. Reading them becomes a source of utter fascination. Years later, I start juxtaposing passages from Sebald's texts and my own photographs. There's many a passage that becomes as closely attached as a friend.
Inspiration II
Calvino, whose urban visions in the shape of a strangely hybrid text appear in the early 70s. Who creates his own verbal nets full of allusions. Who, in his genre-breaking book The invisible cities, presents us with his mix of poetical language and the effects of strictly choosing and juxtaposing elements in a most sophisticated game.
Inspiration III
Roaming the contemporary city, searching for and slowly discovering the layers of time. In the most hands-on sense: relics on every wall, on every pavement, on almost every street sign.
Signs are everywhere. Not everyone sees them.
The eye reads the city and its pictorial riches: images old and new, innocuous and obscene, soothing and cruel, clean and dusty.
Obsessions: Searching and seeing.
The camera keeps something.
The camera and achieving the impossible: documenting that which grows and fades.
Installation
Photographs, texts and three-dimensional objects start to form an indissoluble alliance. The upward swing of the dead branches in the simple vase turn two photographs into the panels of a diptych. The pile of books refers to the related themes of reading and writing and to the author, who is not the man in the panel. The man who is visible to us from the back and who is not the author and, in other words, not Sebald but could easily be him, this man seems to be walking away from the viewer. The way he moves releases the eye from the spatial restrictions and into the work's surroundings.
Language
Language as a means of understanding, of interpretation. Language as a means of reflecting, analysing and distancing.
Language as a means of telling a story. Language as emotion encrusted.
Language as a sensual object, as a source of indulging one's senses.
Language as visual pleasure.
Language and image as equal partners, on the same level, with the same rights.
Light and shadow
The dead and brightly-lit branches reproduce themselves on the photograph where a weird tangle has been captured. At the same time their shadows physically cross the border of the frame and appear on the white wall. The shadows are twofold now, thus intriguing the viewer, who strains his eyes to tell the realities of space and surface apart.
The figure appears as if in the frame of a mirror. He or she studies closely something we can't see on the wall in front.
The figure disappears. What's left are the surroundings bathed in shadow and the arches painted by a soft light whose source is invisible to us.
The figure appears almost like a black shadow, but it isn't just that. We don't know if that person turns his or her gaze towards the viewers or away from us. What we get is the impression of someone who sees; we just don't know who or what the object of the seeing might be. It might be ourselves.
The figure disappears again.
Macro und Micro
An object is lying on a white surface. If you look closely you will notice another one lying behind it. It could be an egg, with a mysterious being about to escape from its shell almost cracked.
It could be a sculpture, made by an artist's hand.
Snow may have been falling. Black ice may have been forming on the ground.
Wings are spreading in delicate detail. They may be the tender branches of a conifer. They may be the legs of a spider. They may be a fragment of a blown-up feather.
Snow may have been falling.
Black ice may have been forming.
Material
The shiny surface of the paper challenges the artist to juxtapose paper and pictures whose colours it makes stand out, quotes or completes. It wants to be touched and appreciated.
The pencil-written passage from the text becomes one with the fabric, which is a special one.
The handmade product and the length of time it has taken to write on it hail of times long past.
The silver box storing the index cards, the gleaming white of the box and the paper focus the viewer's attention on the idea of something valuable but also on that of simple elegance.
The real branch doubles and triples the shadows in the picture photographed.
The real branch visually unites two photographs.
The real branch draws us into the work's sphere and turns us into players inside an installation.
Melancholia
The lonely wanderer by day and by night. Sleeplessness, a motif?
The man sitting alone at the table, oblivious to the world around him. Is he thinking about the journey just behind him, or is he already planning his next steps? The room is nicely bathed in warm hues, but the face and the silence are speaking a different language.
We can just about recognize the man leaving his house. Is he trying to escape, or is he looking for company? Is it the same man at all or a look-alike?
Subdued shades create a feeling of –
Memories
They may mean losing or gaining something. We can store them or suppress them.
We can include them in our personal archive. We can exclude them from it.
They never leave us cold.
They may be utterly fictional.
Mirrors and mirrorlike effects
The mirror allows us a glance into a darkened room, which seems to be a study. But who is studying here, and who is seeing?
The mirror shows a man who goes about his daily chores in a brightly-lit room. Will he turn round? And if he should do so, what or who will he see?
The mirror shows a man sitting at a table, meditating.
Whose doppelganger?
The picture mirrored seems to be that of a medieval town with steeples, half-timbered buildings and the decorative cobble stones of an Italian piazza. The red hue which is everywhere takes the distorted lines to an even higher degree of unreality and reminds the viewer of a fairy tale. The viewer gets the impression of standing in front of the entrance to another world.
Mysteries
A barely visible figure somewhere on the road. Going home, coming back from work or from a shopping trip. It may even be a simple case of sleeplessness.
It’s on a winter’s night, and apart from the vaguely noticeable figure, we see railings slowly emerging to the right and left, we see very broad steps defining the path leading down a hill, and a few moments later squares glowing red appear in the sky above: the windows of suburbia.
The wanderer stops in his tracks and glances back.
He gazes directly at the viewer. This is quite obvious, even if we don’t really see it.
The wanderer, who has been striding along rather energetically, is waiting. The outcome of this is completely in the dark. Somebody may be murdered. Somebody may have been murdered already. On the other hand, it is possible that nothing will happen at all.
It is possible
Night
A winter journey.
Non sequiturs, fragments, crops
The word which doesn’t mean a thing but appears in bold.
The text which is leading nowhere.
The word which is leading nowhere.
The quote which has lost its original context.
The crop of the human foot resting on the bed.
The lines intersecting.
The corner in the basement, which could be storage room as well as an office or an apartment.
The wall framed by the mirror.
Past, present, future
Cliché no. 1: The photograph is always something past already. It always points to something that has decayed. There are critics who say: In the final analysis, it is death itself.
Cliché no. 2: The photograph is always something present. There are critics who say: It is the ongoing moment, it is that reality which lasts forever.
Cliché no. 3: If the photograph is always present, this means that the future is always implied as well.
Question: -
Relationships
Between photographer and photographed, text and image, text and text, image and image, motif and composition. Between the work and its surrounding space. Between the work and its viewer. Nothing static.
The script
The traces written by the rain. Coincidence or no coincidence? Are they actually there or are our eyes simply deceived? Remembrance doesn't give us any clues.
The eye likes to believe whatever it believes to be seeing.
Sebald
W.G. Sebald, born 1944 in Wertach, Allgäu (Germany), died 2001 in a car accident following a supposed heart attack in Norfolk, England.
Sets
The set turns the individual photograph into the part of a whole. It focuses – or seems to focus – on one aspect of the individual work. It stresses something. It insinuates movement and provokes the viewer to move his or her gaze, which may be fluent or fragmentary. The individual work accepts its place as one amongst two or more images, but it doesn't lose anything.
The set, the whole work, doesn't exist without the individual photograph.
The set may be a series of stills.
The set may tell a story like a film does. It may portray protagonists, their relationships and experience. It may be a matter of life and death.
The set may be imaginary. Red, the beginning of an imaginary set called Red. Almost black and white – the beginning of an imaginary set of black and white photographs that are neither black nor white.
Space
Space means the staircase that the tenant quickly leaves behind, the hotel room where the exhausted traveller goes to bed right away, it means the apartment with the television switched on, the basement with the light entering through the window pane, making the viewer want to move in.
Space means the reversed world in the mirror, the back rooms of the empty theatre.
Space is the city the wanderer explores on foot; that the killer needs to find his victim, and that the victim needs to shelter.
Space is all that which lies between, above, below and next to the web's knots. It is the place where stories are told, and images are linked and where human beings relate; where dimensions change. Space offers chances.
Space is the meaning created between two or more pictures.
Space is the forum where every single object may occupy any place.
Space is the forum where every single object has its own well-defined place.
Space is time.
Stories
A man goes down a narrow, steep stair and turns a bend. He’s wearing a dark green coat and is about to leave his house. Or is he about to enter an apartment?
A man is sitting at a table. The expression on his face is pensive, almost bleak. He is sitting there, calmly, a perfect picture of introspection. How long is he going to stay like that?
A man in a light beige sweater is sitting at a round table. Next to him, piles of books and DVDs. An empty chair. A red curtain drawn open. We can look through and at the same time we can’t. Outside there seems to be a clear and bright day.
An empty chair. The red shade of a curtain drawn to. Outside there seems to be a clear and bright day.
A man is moving towards the back of a room. He is not alone.
The TV is switched on.
It is evening.
Text
Text stands in relation to the image. The text was written by a great German author named Sebald.
The text was written by a great Italian author named Calvino.
Reading created epiphanies, some just happening by accident, some by intention. Memories flashed and text passages found their corresponding photographs. The past as written found the past as captured. Who knows the rules?
Flashes in the mind
Text images
The white text on black ground, the black text on white ground: The emphasis is on individual words in larger print, thus making them lose their meaning, and turning them into flat objects. They invite the viewer to play. To continue weaving the web of words.
New stories come into existence that way.
New parts of a continuously growing web come into existence.
The traveller
The traveller enters the room for the first time and will never enter it again.
He will enter it again many more times.
The web
Everything is connected. Photographs to other photographs, photographs to texts, texts to photographs, and texts to other texts. The one is born from the other, without any logical cause but with a powerful inner consequence.
Everything is connected, but somehing new is being born all the time. The web creates itself by continuously adding more and more bits and pieces. Potentially, it never stops weaving and being woven, and only this very exhibition right here and now forces its temporary limitation.
The web, or net, is a woven entity. It means the opposite of imprisonment; it means freedom. It is endlesslessly growing.
© Sigrid Ehemann 2011
A guide to "Sebald - Photography / Collage / Installation", an exhibition in Düsseldorf, 2011.