135 | 2016

ANSELM FRANKE

Ines Schaber: Against the Spell of the Given

Ines Schaber’s work is informed by the insight that representational violence cannot be undone simply by acts of inclusion. It requires the field of the evidential and factual to be put up for negotiation. It means turning the tables on just what is real and what is unreal, on who is a phantom and who isn’t. It is because of this realisation that the question of how to speak to ghosts arises, a question of how to accommodate, to make space for, and to be transformed by those forces that emit their silent imprint on our present. And the shape of the sites where she gives space to this silence through her works, accomodating a social relationality that resists being rendered visible, but that nevertheless insists on its presence. Hence almost all of her projects revolve around a series of landscape photographs, involving history as absent-presence. History subjected to a dialectics of revelation and concealment that is never arbitrary. These photographs are typically shot at the sites of events invoked in her projects: as in walking from Breitenau to Kassel and taking a photograph in response to a complex constellation of thoughts and emotions. The landscape both responds and does not respond. It both delivers itself to the gaze, with all its normative schemes, and it does not—by systematically eluding, even frustrating, certain meanings, certain projections, certain modes of address. But it also puts these modes of address to rest, disarming them. Landscapes are, for Ines Schaber, what the surface of the canvas was for the avant-garde, a force field of the ever-changing relation between subject and object, and their conflicted relationalities and inversions: subjectivisation and objectivation, subjection and objectification; diagrams of social relationality shaped by the vectors of power, biography, and history. They are the scenes for negotiating presence and absence, life and death, humanisation and de-humanisation.
Text feature in Camera Austria International 135/2016, pp. 7–20.

SØNKE GAU

Uriel Orlow: Attempts to Represent the Unrepresentable: On Stories between Words, Images, and in the Gaps of History

Contrary to what the collective singular “history” suggests, history does not simply exist; it cannot be understood as an objective, homogeneous, linear order. In fact, history is produced by classification, discourse, repetition, and omission, which are simultaneously effects and expressions of historically evolved power structures. History in this sense should not be understood as a fact, but rather as narration. In the discipline of history, the last three decades have seen controversial discussions about methods. The constructive nature of history has been questioned self-critically, while possibilities offering other meanings as a result of new approaches in research have been explored. One of these new approaches was ethnographically inspired microhistory. As opposed to conventional historiography, which is primarily interested in the macro level and thus synthesises the knowledge acquired on the basis of abstract categories (which often leads to huge generalisations), microhistory is devoted to smaller units of analysis. The focus of interest here is placed on the “extraordinary normal”, the inclusion of individual and collective parties, the particular and the disruptions, the detailed investigation of which is meant to lead to new contexts. In distinguishing itself from a linear historical progression, microhistory favours polyphony, multi-layeredness, closer proximity to everyday life, world references, and a fine-meshed linkage of various types of sources. One of the problems that evolves from this approach is the form representation should take. Working with details leads to a wealth of particulars, which in turn must be accessed, contextualised, and explained. Non-linear narration harbours the risk of a certain lack of clarity, but also the potential to open up, through its multidimensionality, new referential possibilities, chains of association, and levels of meaning. It is for this reason that the methods of microhistory are such a vital frame of reference for Uriel Orlow.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 135/2016, pp. 21–34.

DIRCK MÖLLMANN

Body Parts: Letters to Willem de Rooij

I write letters. Letters are a provisional act, but physical in a nonchalant way. I send them to you, yet they are addressed to your work, to its inner and outer workings. At least in parts. An artwork, like letters, lives from the gaps in reality, from stumbling in the machinery of meaning, that it problematises—“The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful.”¹ A work, like a published letter, addresses an unknown public.
You disseminate representations in a new way and thus turn them into images. They critically examine the seeing and making of pictures. Their context extends over into the political, the dissemination becomes meaningful, critical, reflexive as always. Yet you work against the pressure to reference. This power throws meaning into limbo, both here and there.
“Residual” (2012) is astounding. At first a word like glass that interjects itself. Its letters are laid bare and point in different directions. Ruisdael works just as well as “Residual”. Then the glass cuboid resting upright along the lengthwise bordered balcony room of the castle on its sandstone ridge. The gaze can roam across the distant land. Only 240 × 120 × 120 centimetres of glass stand in the way of this panorama. The vitrine places a second structure in the space. In it hangs a small painting of a landscape with castle. The accompanying utility technology, controlling climate, humidity, lighting, and the alarm, is situated in the base of the display case. Moving into the room from the north, we first catch sight of the material: at the side, the wooden frame painted in gold; from the front, the glass and the technological equipment. The painting is turned away, as if wanting to avoid being seen from all angles. The transparent object is aligned like a wind rose at the centre of the four points of the compass. The landscape painting is facing west, the direction where it was painted. Its motif is thus self-referential, alluding to the castle where it is now hanging.²

 

¹ Hans-Gerd Koch (Hg.), Franz Kafka. Briefe 1900 – 1912, Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 1999, S. 228. / Cited in Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Orlando et al.: Harcourt, 2005), p. 205.
² Jacob van Ruisdael, »Ansicht der Burg Bentheim von Nordwesten« (View of Burg Bentheim from the Northwest), ca. 1655, Öl auf Leinwand / oil on canvas,  42 × 57,8 cm.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 135/2016, pp. 35–49.

OMAR KHOLEIF

Carrying the Weight of the World

In Greek mythology, the Titan god Atlas was responsible for bearing the weight of the heavens on his shoulders, an affliction bestowed upon him as punishment by Zeus. This giant of a god was to have his name affiliated with many a thing: from the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, to the Atlantic Ocean, and to the maps over which we pore day in and day out. This idea of such an infinite construct also informed the philosopher and art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemo-syne Atlas, a visual topography that sought to create affective relationships between images otherwise unrelated.
In 2011, the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman paid homage to Warburg’s Atlas project with an exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.¹ Here, Didi-Huberman raised questions about the function of the image, a purpose, the exhibition suggested, that could be “precise” only in specific contexts. Images, the exhibition and accompanying texts argued, are, at best, only symptoms or gestures that enable one to position oneself in relation to the “real”. Echoing Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the image in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, the exhibition suggested that it is life itself that is at stake in representation, be it political or pictorial, and, conversely, that representation—of the same orders—places life at stake.
I have sought to consider this concept of life at stake in our era, when the politics of the everyday have turned into an increasingly afflictive violence against the human body at a global scale. This can be seen in the embodied acts of terror that have come to claim human lives of late. The list is endless, but we could start with
Istanbul’s airport attacks in 2016, or with everyday life in Cairo and Damascus after 2011, or, perhaps most precisely (in Didi-Huberman’s sense), in Orlando, Florida, where the “body”—specifically, the LGBTQI body’s biosocial and political function as a minority-liberated, dissident sexual subject—was completely annihilated in plain sight.

 

¹ Exhibition “Atlas: How to carry the world on one’s back?”, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 26. 11. 2010 – 28. 3. 2011; ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, 7. 5. – 7. 8. 2011; Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, 1. 10. − 27. 11. 2011.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 135/2016, pp. 72–74.