CAMPAGNE
PREMIÈRE Germany | Berlin
OCTOBER 14,
2016-DECEMBER 03, 2016
In Matthias
Müller's extensive new group of works consisting of photographic works, a
multiple and a video, the artist makes use of an archive of 1,500 screenshots.
The images come from streams emanating from private chat rooms of the Web 2.0.
The hundred
postcards of the edition ‘You Are Here’ offer views into one hundred of these
empty chat rooms that all share one characteristic: On their walls are
geographical maps of all types – urban maps, topographic maps, sections of
atlases. They seem to reflect the wish to participate in another, larger world
and at the same time express a strange ambivalence arising from the fact that
the virtual space on the Internet, concealed by the protagonists through
fantasy names such as “Neverland” or “Somewhere,” are linked to their actual
location by these references. Coming to light here is the irreconcilable
conflict of borderless proximity: the yearning to be simultaneously anonymous
and located, both individual and omnipresent. By transforming the screenshots
into postcards and thus handing them over to the viewer who can touch and move,
even mail them, Müller restores an intimacy and binding character to
communication – qualities that are under threat in the World Wide Web.
In the
photographic work ‘While You Were Out,’ Müller arranges countless office chairs
according to shape and color in the style of a scientific wall chart. Also in
‘Waiting Rooms,’ a frieze consisting of 28 individual prints, the artist
transfers interiors into a serial arrangement and, through almost film-like
connections, conveys the impression of a common bond existing between them. The
selection, treatment and composition of his images gives rise to a
concentration of reality which, amid the random nature of the appearances,
reveals an almost harmonic order. Müller imbues his spaces with a painterly
quality by blurring them slightly in the low-fi resolution of consumer webcams
and transforming them into frozen-frame images as inkjet prints, thereby
restoring them to an analogue sphere. Cracquelé-like, digital artifacts convey
the impression of tiny fissures in the glaze upon paintings, and the choice of
pictorial motifs is reminiscent of the subjects and representational forms of
painting – whether the delicate atmospheres of light in Vermeer's spaces or the
melancholic interiors of the symbolist Hammershøi.
In the
video loop ‘Air,’ the “low” provenance and trivial motifs of the visual
material stand in contrast to the sublimity of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach
as an elaborate expression of high culture. But just as the images of the empty
spaces do not show the presence of any persons, so has the musical composition
been partly stripped of its melodic upper voice: The minimalistic bass line
seems like an etude with multiple variations of a simple musical motif. The
title ‘Air’ alludes to the mode of Internet users whose images provide the
visual material of the video: They are broadcasting, are “on air.” At the same
time, the title refers to the effects of air currents we are observing; it sometimes
seems as if an analogue breeze is stirring up the digital clusters and
artifacts of the webcam images.
With his
treatment of visual material from the Web 2.0, Müller focuses on a part of
moving picture production that differs in various ways from the filmic genres
which up to now have been central to his individual works and joint projects
with Christoph Girardet. This extensive sector does not consist of professional
productions but is the work of amateurs. The recordings made here are not
introduced into a new narrative sequence with the help of montage but develop
in real time with no external intervention. They have a fleeting character and
are normally not preserved. Most of the time, these images involve only one
figure who produces them and is simultaneously their subject. Matthias Müller
is interested in the moments when the protagonists have departed from the
scene. As spaces that are simultaneously private and public, chat rooms have
lost the domestic space's fundamental function of protecting intimacy and
turned into virtual contact zones for exhibitionists and voyeurs instead. In
Müller's treatments, they are freed of their subservient function as backdrops
for performances. With his studies of presence and absence, the artist is
continuing his investigation and representation of spaces which, in his various
filmic and photographic works, evolve into autonomous, evocative spheres of
contemplation and experience, are transformed into stages and projection
surfaces for emotional and psychological states and processes.
Contact
details
Chausseestrasse
116 , Berlin, Germany D-10115
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