PHOTO:Evoking Reality, Part II

Starting in the early 1990s, the at Daimler Art Collection (DAC) expanded the focus of its collection to works of new media: photography, video, object art and installations. The new acquisitions were presented in the three-part exhibition series “Photography, Video, Mixed Media I-III” (2003-2007). This focus on photography and video has been pursued intensively ever since. Today, the collection consists of a constantly growing portfolio of significant works that visualize contemporary perspectives on global issues and political conflicts (Part I).

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Daimler Art Collection Archive

Based on a re-reading of “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) by Susan Sontag, the exhibition “Evoking Reality” at Daimler Art Collection (DAC) focuses on photographs and video and deals with current media and conceptual approaches to political, public and resulting private conflict situations. The interweaving of fiction, staging, construction and reality creates uncertainty in the observer, who experiences each strategy of alienation as unexpected and at the same time as an instance of reality creation. For her 20-part series “The Russian Ending” (2001), Tacita Dean refers to historic postcards from the beginning of the 20^th Century. Using photomechanically produced copper prints, called heliogravure or photogravure, she enlarges and duplicates the historical images and supplements handwritten remarks. The hanging as an image sequence arranged by the artist resembles a narrative about tragic events and their consequences: sinking warships, aerial photographs of destroyed regions, explosions, scenes of funerals. The partially overwritten and blurred text fragments on camera work, sound, light and genre resemble director instructions and transform the photographs into cinematographic storyboards. The depictions thus find their way into the present. They are manipu-lated to adapt to a new style of visual production. The first image, Ship of Death, depicts a flooded boat on a turbulent sea. Maya Zack’s photograph “Living Room 4” is part of an audiovisual installation that consists of a total of four depictions of the living situation of a Jewish family in Berlin-Charlottenburg in the 1930s. Guy Tillim’s the series of photos “Museum of the Revolution” were taken in the African cities of Johannesburg, Durban, Maputo, Beira, Harare, Nairobi, Kigali, Kampala, Addis Abeba, Luanda, Libreville, Accra, Dakar and Dar es Salaam. The title of the seriesrefers to the museum of the same name in Mozambique, but at the same time it also plays on the ubiquitous signs of past revolutions and historical conquerors in the streets of Africa (in monuments, street names, etc.). In 2012, Mustafah Abdulaziz started the ongoing long-term project “Water”, which deals with the changes in global landscapes caused by the dramatically dwindling element of water and the resul-ing deprivation of resources for humans and nature. For the photographer the starting point to deal with anthropogenic landscapes as a result of climatic changes was the confrontation with a United Nations (UN) statistic, which predicted that 3.4 billion people would be affected by a lack of water by 2025. The series is thus conceived as a holistic form of photographic typology of a natural resource in crisis and envisages making people around the world aware of the existential significance of the element of water and inspiring them to understand global contexts. The work “Snow White” (2001), conceived as a double projection by Berni Searle, marks the first video piece done by the artist, who received her Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Cape Town in 1992. Early on, she used her own body as material for her pieces, which she examined in light of the highly complex and problematic dimensions of the categories of physical constitution in reference to societal, political, and economic mechanisms. In the portrait series of Pieter Hugo, reality is portrayed in images that often seem surreal. How can a living situation, spanned between the past and present of a location be represented in interaction with the individuality and expectations of a person towards the future? The landscape, natural or human-designed, that surrounds the subjects in the large-format portraits that Hugo took in Nigeria in 2005, in Ghana in 2010, in Rwanda in 2015, and in his country of birth South Africa in 2016, create a visual unity of person and environment that are interdependent. His excerpt-like focus on landscape brings with it a multitude of connotations and problematics. On presentation are works by: Mustafah Abdulaziz, Jane Alexander, Clément Cogitore, Tacita Dean, Alia Farid, Cao Fei, Abrie Fourie, Pieter Hug, Sigalit Landau, Richard Mosse , Viviane Sassen, Oskar Schmidt, Berni Searle, Guy Tillim, Sharif Waked and Maya Zack.

Info: Curators: Renate Wiehager and Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Daimler Contemporary Berlin, Haus Huth, Alte Potsdamer Straße 5, Berlin, Duration: 25/11/18-5/5/19, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-18:00, http://art.daimler.com