JANA SEEHUSEN | cut.

Opening: Friday, 5 September 2008, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 6 - 20 September 2008

Cut. Cut to reality. A caesura dead centre through the media circus horizons that roll past us. Jana Seehusen's daily cuts "are reminiscent of laboratory activities in the field of mental production and reception. We are dealing here with base material and substrates, with fragments and processes, and with isolation and montage." (Veronika Darian) 

The base material consists of daily newspapers, from which images and texts are cut out, analysed and filed. This >daily archive< containing press photographs and text fragments becomes the raw material for Seehusen's creative work. An oscillating interconnected web of imagined and media portrayal emerges as a result of disconnected words and images, rendering the gap between documentation and fiction perceptible. The “iconic” state of the western world and the representation of this reality in the medial world are at stake here. 

Cut. Seehusen's current series >endlich diese Wirklichkeit< (reality at last) negotiates present-day press photographs that originate from very disparate contexts despite their formal similarities. At the centre of the montage are selected images orchestrated to individual strands of a panoramic sequence. The actors in various isolated incidents are placed in relation to one another in a quasi simultaneous image space, suggesting a causal and chronological interrelatedness. In reality they involve episodes or events that have occurred utterly independent of each other in different places across the globe at different times. Parallel to this, existing text fragments are recomposed and made audible as narrative scraps. The methods used to produce both texts and images fluctuate between documentary strategies and references to stage and even film narrative structures. In a complex web of historical experience and contemporary society, non-linear narratives are constructed between the potentially conflicting poles of subjective and collective (image)memory: a scope of action for productions of meaning. 

Cut. Welcome to reality.