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The Sprengel Museum Hannover will mount a retrospective of works by Katharina Gaenssler, a Munich-based artist (born in 1974) in its Space for Photography.
This retrospective consists of 24 works in book form, adding up to a total of 87 volumes. Each of these hand-bound works of art was created in very limited editions.
Katharina Gaenssler perceives single images as details of visual flow. This movement occurs by passing through a space, whether a studio, a library, a prison cell, an entire city or country, or even in an intimate context. The artist dissects spaces with her camera; the result can be seen in a plethora of single frames which she then collects into books that are also sometimes presented as installations. Using this method, she took 8764 pictures while travelling on the Tran-Siberian railway, which Gaenssler then assembled into 13 volumes. While visiting the former KGB-penitentiary in Potsdam, she pressed the trigger of her camera 14,355 times. The result of that process is a nine-volume work of art. Each photograph is part and parcel of the entire work and of equal importance. The subjective nature of taking a photograph provides a counterbalance to the mechanical nature of the procedure itself. At the same time, her camera functions as an instrument which allows her to possess images, thereby taking them over for her own purposes. What occurs in the moment that a photograph is taken is individual‚ and it has been preserved, making it available at any time.
The interaction/overlapping of art and everyday life takes us to the space where this work will be on view, in Schwitters' Merzbau. The reconstruction of this room within the Sprengel Museum Hannover has also captured Gaenssler's attention and is dealt with in the framework of her retrospective. The complex layering inherent in the nature of the Merzbau contains traces of Kurt Schwitters’ accomplishments during his active career, showing how they relate to the continuing process of realising this tour-de-force work-in-progress. Gaenssler plays with the essence of this unique space by contrasting fragments and mass, the ephemeral and that which is fixed, reality and fantasy: she deconstructed the Merzbau, using her camera to follow how a gamut of fragments can be perceived as a whole, and, through qualities unique to a book as a medium, re-ordered the reconstruction of the space. The viewer is then challenged to become aware of his or her own active energies while paging through the book as well as in the process of perceiving the reconstruction of this collage-like installation. In the process, individual visual impressions come together with imaginary single frames to create an entire, organic whole.
(Source: Christine Eckett for Sprengel Museum Hannover, on occasion of the exhibition "Katharina Gaenssler. Werkschau", until 2.5.2010
The sometimes from thousands of existing frames collected collages, which together make up a situation room, hear about the phenomena of our time, the never-ending stream of images of expanding storage capacity and a manic desire to collect and categorize. However, less than the recognition of truth, the photographic search Gaenssler Katharina , born is 1974 in Munich, the understanding of spatial and temporal dimensions in the foreground. The works question our relationship to the image, producing, collecting, archiving of images, which they themselves are inherently bound. They throw us back ultimately to the constructed nature of our order and thus reality. The wall collages of the artist, however, are ephemeral: After the exhibition, the individual photocopies torn from the wall. What remains are décollages. Thus, the construction of the Total shifted towards focusing on detail, which releases the look for the experience of a novel, pictorial reality. (Gallery of the artists BBK, Munich)
