I Guess....I Guess Not Event

20.6 - 4.7.2018

RUDI RAPF
SIEGMUND SKALAR
SOPHIE THUN
STEFAN WANKA

When George Baker paraphrases Rosalind Krauss in his essay Photography?s Expanded Field, he reminds us, that photography is no longer the privileged middle term between two things that isn?t. Photography is rather only one term on the periphery of a field, in which there are other, differently structured formal and cultural, possibilities. Modernist medium-specificity does not simply dissipate into the pluralist state of ?anything goes? but rather expands the field. New relations of art and the world and the larger cultural field are starting to emerge and require restatement. The medium has been decentered and put off balance between oppositional extremes that might serve as a possible basis.

Baker grounds his theory in oppositional extremes based on his observations of August Sander?s work, contrasting the notion of narrativity with opposing stasis. The former encompasses all forms of communicative diagesis and discursivity, the latter the attempted silencing of the photographs referentiality. He reenforces the negation in form of non-stasis and non-narrativity as the founding pillars of his expansionary process. However, since his constitution of the expanded field more than 20 years ago, the undergoing radical changes in the medium seem to be too fast, unable to be reigned in by the Kraussian terms.

Has the expanded field collapsed under its own dispersal? Does the artistic practice now still remain within a certain field defined by Baker?s coordinates? The terms involved have undeniably now become more complex. The different positions in the exhibition try to come to terms with that complexity, proposing new oppositional forays and mapping possibilities.

Rudi Rapf?s work elaborates on the Bakerian talking picture, the fusion of narrative and stasis - by embracing digital montage, he creates photographic simulacra of an infinitely stretched moment in time. Apophenia by Stefan Wanka reconnects with the notion of the Bakerian still film - somewhere between narrativity and non-narrativity - where the projected image takes the form of found video footage.
Sophie Thun states the case for a spatial mapping, resisting the lure of the postmodern foreclosure of the allegedly outmoded medium. The physicality of a photograph gains a new performativity in her layered exposures. The spatial takes another turn with Siegmund Skalar?s sharing of seemingly unimportant and trivial facts. By exposing the medium to its own shortcomings, he might just state the obvious, or just the very opposite: The medium is anything but the lamentable expedient that postmodernism makes it out to be.