Numerous screens and projection surfaces, placed all over the exhibition rooms of Galerie in “Uncertain memories", play off fragmented sequences of film loops where mysterioulsy, weightless curtains and veils slowly move within a not identifiable space.
Uncertain memories
Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce “uncertain memories" - the
3rd solo show with Berlin artist Bernhard Kahrmann - a graduate of the
Stuttgart Art Academy and the Amsterdam Rijksakademie. Kahrmann (born 1973)
could last be seen in Stuttgart in 2004 with a complex room installation in
the dome of the Wurttembergischen Kunstverein. The recent catalogue
“Bernhard Kahrmann: Somewhere - Not Here" (Revolver-Verlag) was published
for the three venues of that show: the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein,
Stuttgart, the Punktleuchten Littmann Kulturprojekte, Basel and the Museum
Goch, Goch.
Numerous screens and projection surfaces, placed all over the exhibition
rooms of Galerie Reinhard Hauff in “uncertain memories", play off fragmented
sequences of film loops where mysterioulsy, weightless curtains and veils
slowly move within a not identifiable space. A shrill, bright light sweeps
across the rooms, blinds the viewer and breaks up into prismatic colours.
The parameters of the exhibition rooms and the passages in which the
lightweight materials seem to be moving as through a light breeze, can only
be perceived as flickering, truncated architectural fragments. The light
which falls through a window or door opening never seems to come from
“outside" or beyond the space in which wind and air gives movement to light.
All the colours are subdued - there are no sound effects, no cutting or
framing of images, no camera movement. In these new, starkly reduced works,
Kahrmann renounces on the suggestive images with their storyline - or at
least what could be interpreted as desriptive references - which were woven
into the fabric of his previous light installations. Space, light and the
flapping of cloth combine for an atmospheric, primordial image which - much
like a computer generated animation - contains nothing of human reference.
This environment is a densily associative space where - contrary to
KahrmannŒs earlier video- and slide installations in which the viewer was
physically immersed in the projection- movement has been transferred and
restricted to the monitors.
This movement away from direct and towards indirect experience of the
spatial boundaries of the installation where room structures were perceived
as architectural props, have in this show been carried to a consequent,
total minimalist reduction inasmuch as these images and projections now
embody nothing concrete, tangible - nothing with authentic human or man-made
reference. Likewise, the memories or feelings they evoke also begin to
waver, dissolve, disintegrate and destabilize as a fitting commentary on
contemporary visual experience.
Galerie Reinhard Hauff
Paulinenstr. 47 - Stuttgart