Juan Araujo, Tobias Buche, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Yaron Leshem, Michaela Meise, Barbara Visser
Construction Time Again presents works that reflect on issues of presentation
and the production of images in a visually saturated culture. The exhibition seeks
to question the ideological implications of the image as a layering of historical,
cultural and social systems and examines the way in which, as spectators, we
approach, filter and interpret information. There is no such thing as an image
without fictions. As Jacques Rancière states: “the real must be fictionalized in
order to be thought”. In Barbara Visser’s Two Projections (2005), a static image of
the artist’s studio acts as a framing device for a slide projection showing images
of modernist furniture. The focus oscillates between apparently insignificant
details and overly meaningful imagery as an uncertain relationship is established
between the narrative of early Modernism and the personal memories of Visser’s
grandmother, Miep van de Sleen-de Vries, who used to collect and design
furniture for her own house.
De Rijke/De Rooij’s slide projection Orange (2004) acknowledges a critical
distance between the space of representation and that of reference. The
reduction of the image to abstract shades of a single colour – significantly
excluded from the spectrum of colour films because of the pink cast it produces
on skin tones – is here associated with very specific political and social
connotations, such as the colour of uniforms worn by prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay or neo-conservative sympathizers for the House of Orange in Holland.
Read moreThe works in Construction Time Again function by referring to and collapsing
diverse visual registers and deferring meaning to what lies beyond the frame.
Tobias Buche’s complex arrangements of press cuttings, personal photographs
and historical images invite a spatial way of looking. The images are physically
related but loosely connected in a synchronic montage. The work counters the
emphasis placed on the singular image with multiple narrative perspectives that
accelerate and decelerate across the installation’s spatial planes. Juan Araujo’s
paintings and Yaron Leshem’s photographic series Intrepid (2006) are charged
with a palpable tension between the desire to represent, the awareness of visual
stereotypes and the limits of the medium and how it has been used to express
and translate reality into a visual output. Araujo’s series of paintings Cuadros del
Cerrito (2006) reproduce pages of catalogues and publications featuring Villa
Planchart, built in Caracas between 1953 and 1958 by architect Gio Ponti.
The features on the villa reflect a particular international vision and belief system,
as much as the interest in design and collecting that dominated the prosperous
Venezuelan upper class of the time. Michaela Meise creates sculptures, which are
formally indebted to minimalism. Pasted with photographic portraits of iconic
figures such as Nico, the vocalist with the Velvet Underground or VALIE
EXPORT, the structures become enigmatic physical extensions of the image into
space and various narrative levels emerge from their delicate balancing act. By
elaborating physical structures and discursive constructions that blur the
boundaries between the logics of fact and fiction, these works point to the
conventions that define the procedures of power while actively opening up the
potential of meaning contained in an image as something which is always
incomplete and voiceless.
Construction Time Again has been curated by Elena Crippa and Silvia Sgualdini.
