ULRIKE HANNEMANN | Drift

Opening: Friday, 09.10.2015, 7 pm

Exhibition: 10.10.–07.11.2015

Ulrike Hannemann in her work utilizes highly diverse materials and objects ranging from organic finds, photographs from her archive, all the way to postcards and mass-produced throwaway items: It all melds together, into autobiographical landscapes. The artist provokes this showdown between personal memories and trash culture by initially letting these various collected source materials clash, composing them to new worlds of image and thought. Before paper backdrops on which wear and light have inscribed themselves as a patina, then again before garish, like-new all-over structures she stages as gray cards of pop culture, she assembles the image components into new spaces of association.

 These arrangements are leveled by photography. Hannemann freezes the paper-thin bulges, the air between the image layers, codifies all those diverse loose planes of reference. She goes the way from sculpture to photography. Yet even photographically intertwined, the airiness of her layerings seems to be intent on countering photography’s one-dimensionality. Thus the call is for an attentive regard at every single picture, for checking its makeup, reading its construction backwards.

 Content-wisely, too, the artist refuses to submit to any kind of definitude. Thus, for instance, the lithographic depiction of a species of fish and the photo of a shark are juxtaposed like proverbially dry, scientific impartation and personally acquired experience: the difference between first and second-degree experience seems to be enforced through the comparison of images. How the shark’s gray skin visually emulates the meticulously cut-out fish and makes it look almost as mounted illustrates Hannemann’s curatorial skill, crafting an exciting ambivalence when she deals with her visual materials.