JANA SEEHUSEN | Taming a Beast Gracefully

Opening: Friday, 2 September 2011, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 3 September - 1 October 2011

 

The ocean panorama begins with images of the sea, far removed from the sea itself. Commonly used as a symbol for rise or fall, for suspense and promise, these familiar sea views span a wide field of meaning: from a place of longing to a disordered space of upheaval. 

While the ocean as an empty stateless space, in Jana Seehusen’s photo montage it becomes a projection screen to connect atopic event constellations. A newspaper cutting of ocean waves and a bright sky forms the symbolic basis. Seehusen mounts visual constructs on to this picturesque motif, entangling events taken from daily newspapers in such a controversial way that the border between a cultural view and political or catastrophic events becomes fuzzy. 

In the superimposed and interwoven image layers, content is both emphasized and concealed. The result is a topology of gaps and overlappings and of changing directions and contemporaneity, all of which reject a chronologically linear presentation of event reporting. Structurally close to Warburg’s Mnemosyne notice boards, the irregularity of the formats, emphases and omissions gives rise to gaps and skips in the photographs. Memories, intimations and a sense of forgetting are overlaid in the arrangements, where the contemporaneity and intangibility of the events are multiplied, thus rendering them sketchy imprints of stories. 

In “Auf anmutige Art eine Bestie zu Bändigen”, the monstrous is more a shifting moment in time than an entity. Where uncertainty and promise meet, our idea of events is characterized by desire and invention – but undoubtedly more of this later.