BERLIN.- The fourth scenario of fake or feint exhibition project presents a series of photographs by Amy Granat, a media installation by Annja Krautgasser and a space installation by Katrin Mayer.
In Amy Granat’s series The W.Lee Prints #1-10 the photographic surface becomes the setting for a fragmented mediality. The scratching of the image carrier, the use of acids, light cones and cross fadings leave distinct traces. This often destructive use of the physical basics of image transmission, such as the film base, chemicals and light, allow for an expansion of photographic vocabulary. Regarding the employed graphical material (photographed book covers, pictures, text pages and arrangements of simple objects) the technical intervention appears as a means of dissociative postproduction. Amy Granat works with allusions to literature, film and personal experiences, as for example the series’ title refers amongst others to the protagonist of W.S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. In its composition the series offers a suggestive narrative which operates with the spectators capability to produce his or her own connections.
In her media installation VOID.SEQZ5 Annja Krautgasser works with a specific script she originally developed for audiovisual performances. The computer animation shows an initially white surface. Short black lines break in from the borders, err in coincidental navigation over the projection surface and compose a growing pattern. In an autogenerative process of accumulative growth and overlap an abstract image emerges and finally freezes, until the process starts all over again and creates a similar but never identical picture. The parallel audio track by composer Martin Siewert unfolds an atmospherical soundscape which swells as the picture evolves.
Annja Krautgassers ten-piece series VEGAS (sound: Martin Siewert) deals with the illusionist architecture of the metropolis of amusement. Las Vegas is the outstanding example for a cityscape where architectonic form stands back behind a sign covered structure of facades and surfaces. Illuminated advertising pointing to the omnipresent entertainment opportunities (casinos, shows, restaurants etc.) not only offers orientation for consumer decisions. It is also part of a spectacle of signs which visually stages the aspect of distraction already at the level of urban space and draws its overwhelming effect exactly from the spectator’s overstimulation. Annja Krautgasser takes this luminous advertising out of its context and confers it upon an abstract analytical layout. A matrix of light dots, evoking pixels or light bulbs, serves as tool to investigate animated arrows, pulsating patterns, pictograms, chains of letters and motion sequences in individual studies. By these means the artist explores patterns of the attraction of attention and the transmission of information, as well as the interlocking of technically produced illusion and visual perception.
Specifically designed for fake or feint, Katrin Mayer’s space installation explores the realm of club-culture and spatial and temporal patterns associated with social rituals, architecture and music. The artist thereby establishes a relationship between the exhibition space and its immediate surroundings, among other things playing with the term ‚Berlin Carré‘, today’s name of the typical 60s socialist concrete-style former ‚Markthalle‘. Using the gaps between the ceiling panels, strips of wall paper are hanging into the exhibition room, constituting a three-dimensional continuation of their square pattern. This temporary expansion of the architecture at the same time provides a display structure for images which were extracted from mobile-phone videos found at the internet portal YouTube. These were shot in clubs such as „Weekend“, situated at the opposite side of Alexanderplatz, and add a new visual quality to processes of mythmaking: „hearsay“ becomes „seeshow“. Subjective, diffuse and grainy snap shots convey impressions of temporary getaways, an economy of excess and modes of non-productive expenditure. Silver glitter laid out in a square shape on the tiled floor materialises the imagery of glamour, excess and illusion. It pervades the space with a loose glittering layer that – similar to the fragility and yellowing of the paper strips – alludes to the transient, unseizable meandering of beats, clubs and the corresponding image practices.
fake or feint is a seven-month exhibition project taking place at Berlin Carré at Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Five consecutive exhibition scenarios and a film scenario at Kino Arsenal at Potsdamer Platz deal with the politics of the surface and acts of marking as an intervention. Internationally renowned artists show works ranging from photography, video- and space installation to site-specific intervention. A ‚second section‘ designed by artist Katrin Mayer hosts a process-related archive with selected material. A series of events accompanies the exhibitions with seminars, lectures, performances and artist talks.
