OLIVER KREBS | Golden Record

Opening: Friday, 28.10.2016, 7 pm
Exhibition: 29.10.–19.11.2016

Golden Record

How we look at things shows what we are!

Oliver Krebs developed a photography which deliberately moves between the “classical” photographic angle and a painterly context. - with its metamorphoses. In particular the documentary character of the spontaneous, fleeting aspect of the photographic image encourages to try to discover the qualities that are innate to this medium, qualities that necessarily distinguish photography from the other artistic visual media.

The search for criteria by which to judge images, which is becoming increasingly relevant in their production and selection, brought to my attention a seemingly absurd project. In 1976 NASA set up a committee to choose 115 images that would be encoded as a dataset on a golden phonograph record and then sent on a journey through outer space to communicate with potential extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The idea of portraying the whole of humankind living on our planet Earth in all its diversity to some form of intelligence that would receive this information at some distant point in space and time is gloriously absurd. But our need to explain ourselves to others is all too human and endearing.

A photography that in its directness leads to abstraction. These are images that struggle to be matter-of-fact and thereby take on something of the stage setting.