SABINE SCHRÜNDER | Ellipses

Opening: Friday, 15 October 2010, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 16 October - 13 November 2010
Finissage: Saturday, 13 November 2010, 5 p.m.

In her latest work Ellipses, Sabine Schründer continues the approach already adopted in intrude (into) of concentrating the fundamental into a small number of mutually corresponding images. Digitally manipulated photographs such as “Tree”, “Tower” and “Steps” seem to be in a state of self-contained floatingness, thereby transforming into something fictitious the notion of real space that surrounds us. In this new work, Schründer no longer merely “deletes” specific image details but by means of montage and the replication of individual picture elements, creates new, self-contained spaces. 

She combines this hermetically sealed world – to which there seems at first to be no access – with found data and a video showing an endless list of names. Each of the millions of names that flash across the screen at high speed represents a real person, their life story and consequently their social integration. However, the subject and identity levels remain unseen. The absence of portraits is deliberate. Neither is there a conscious effort to penetrate personal histories. Instead, combinations of images, source codes and video open up topic areas such as anonymization, data massification and the blurring of isolation and transparency. 

Between symbolic spaces, places and references, the ellipses (the gaps, the missing in something) become a speculative empty space. The gaps and omissions both in and outside of the images form a link, symbolizing as they do a social system in which the boundaries between the private and the public are gradually becoming more and more fuzzy, the channels increasingly hidden and the platforms vague, while the conventional term that describes the individual and the person is dissolving with time.