SOPHIE AIGNER | Where the snot flows out it will flow in again.

Opening: Friday, 13.02.2015, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 14.02.–14.03.2015

Some Fragments on some Fragments

1.

Where the snot flows out it will flow in again. At least when snorted up. Yet there’s that spot, too, from where it will just keep running: across the lips, over the chin, bubbling up. Then it’s over with snorting it up. Just like toothpaste can’t be squeezed back into the tube, a paper tissue can’t be pushed back into the package, and while broken jars can be glued together again, it won’t conceal the damage done.

2.

In Sophie Aigner’s photography Nor Beginning an internal temporality can be discerned, a dramaturgy resulting from the pictorial composition: at first a destroyed stairwell can be recognized, or rather the image of a destroyed stairwell interrupted by an incision which opens up a vista onto an abstract crack of turquoise-colored fabric – quite reminding of a crotch agape.

 With the regard wandering further, down to the picture’s lower edge, all of a sudden the pictorial planes shift: the seemingly abstract textile backdrop proves to be an actual and very concrete crotch, a closed one the photograph of the destroyed stairwell is superimposed on. Strangely intimate this moment is when the picture suddenly turns and the crotch sensed in abstraction unexpectedly becomes concrete: her own crotch the artist photographed from her point of view.

3.

“Black bile is the juice of the melancholic; they are the ear-minded and should eat things bittersweet only rarely; blood is the juice of the sanguine type: oral man who must shy from spicy food; phlegm is the juice of the phlegmatic who are their noses, and things bitter are opposed to their humor; yellow bile as in tears is the juice of the choleric: optical types who should abstain from salty food.”

4.

Reminds me of this photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans: Love (hands praying), 1987 I believe the title is: a similar process of abstraction of the body by way of clipping, arrangement of textile planes, and an extreme perspective. Nonetheless both photographs do not create the sense of watching a mere trick played out (as with abstraction anything can be rendered so long as the camera is close enough and the object sufficiently clipped). In both pictures the photographer’s body is presented as something eventually incomprehensible to them, and out of reach. In Nor Beginning by way of the ruin an aspect of existential unrest is added, a rearing resignation. Perhaps it is also some fatalism of the body casting (behind) a melancholy glance upon the origin of the world.

Text by Nick Koppenhagen