Intro

Klemm’s, Berlin, APR 28 – JUN 10, 2017
Opening: Friday, APR 28, 2017 | 6–9pm

Special opening hours during Gallery Weekend Berlin:
Friday, APR 28 | 11 am – 9 pm
Saturday, APR 29 – Sunday, APR 30 | 11 am – 7 pm

What do images communicate without any indication of the source, location, or the motivation behind what
has been captured in them? Viktoria Binschtok achieves just such a situation in Cutting Straws at Midnight,
confronting us with a wild mix of decontextualized components that construct a reality all its own immanent to
the image and leaving the rest to our cognitive abilities. Sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, these visual
clusters demonstrate their uncanny affinity based on the calculations of a machine and the incalculability of an
artistic gesture.

The precisely re-staged photographs, which always refer to already existing images, refuse to be easily
classified in standard genres by their artificial appearance—cuts, overlappings of several visual layers, and
elements that go beyond visual borders take up our screen-based habits of vision and move them to an offline
space. Still life or snapshot, professional or amateur photograph, private or public: all filters are turned off.
Networked visual information distracts us for a moment from our linear thinking in favor of a pleasurable
engagement with a medium that for a long time now has not only been instrumentalized politically, but has
become a yardstick for all of us in our culture of instant evaluation. It is the currency in the attention business,
always rising in value, yet its subtext is an old one: it could all be this way, but it could also be entirely
different.

Viktoria Binschtok lives and works in Berlin. Her works have been presented both in numerous solo and group
exhibitions, in recent years a.o. at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; C/O Berlin; KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Centre de la Photographie Genève, Switzerland;
pier24, San Francisco, USA; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centre Pompidou, Metz, France; Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt am Main; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg; Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, The
Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, Siberia; Kunstverein Göttingen; Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig