A comparison of these two positions with each other soon reveals fundamental similarities in terms of the artistic modus operandi: the artists are characterised by an interest in current political and social reality. Their deconstruction and reconstruction work is based on research, documentation and an archive of photographic images built up over many years. The focus of their interest is on observing public and private places and living situations. Their works invite us to reflect on the experience of time and on political and historical change. Here we see a conception of history in which the private – often intimate – and the political/public are not divided, and one of the aims of their artistic work seems to be to unearth meaning in the layers of perception, experience and memory and to allow the viewer and reader of their works to share in this.

IOSIF KIRÁLY: Reconstructions
This project commenced in 2000 represents (as the artist says) an attempt to make, “with the help of photography, sections in different personal situations and experiences that took place a longer time ago or more recently, to examine how I remember (and forget) people, places, events. ‘Reconstructions’ are compound poly-perspective images whereby each snapshot acts as a byte of information and memory”. The seams between the individual images visibly mark the gesture of joining and document the scrutinising, ordering view in which these pictorial constituents create a new, albeit discontinuous image. In the first montages, the overlapping individual images were taped together in such a way that the transitions appeared accentuated and also as emphasising the layering of multiple images. Although the digital technology used later, and still used today, allows multiple images to be joined on a single support, the cracks in perception, the tension between the different fields and areas remain the basis for our perception of the image.

CHRISTIAN WACHTER: Impressions D’AFRIQUE
This work by Austrian artist Christian Wachter from 1998 and 2006 is being shown for the first time as an exhibition, after initially being in the form of an artist’s book – a form predestined to arrange the work’s different narrative threads in separate chapters, and to organise these in a sequence of successive pages. The various parts of the project have been given a new emphasis for the exhibition and now relate to each other spatially: “Les Incomparables / The Incomparables”, a series of some sixty photographs whose sequence corresponds to the central chapter of the artist’s book, constitutes the main body of the exhibition. The incomparable may be taken to represent an attempt at a description that encompasses everything – the private and the public, one’s own experience, and received, mediated knowledge. Threads that are separate in terms of the plot, and that are only connected by encounters with other people and by the author’s perception, are picked up and woven together into a narrative. The combination of scientific research and aesthetic effect invite the viewer to embark – along his / her own route – on an expedition.