Still/ Life

Techniques and technologies of remembrance are instances such as museums and archives, storage media such as photography, film and video, distribution channels such as satellite television or the Internet. In their network, they create a mass of more or less interchangeable, private and public images of fixed moments of reality that are almost impossible to cope with every day. Reality itself appears in these "still lifes" as a collection of rigid motifs, of which any number of the same prints can always be made, as if the world was designed everywhere according to the same scheme - photo and television-appropriate: from natural paradise to the living room, the supermarket to the standardized high-rise complexes on the periphery of the big cities.

The exhibition "Still | Life ”presented five artistic approaches that deal with access to“ reality ”in the age of its technical reproducibility - and the endless accumulation of its reproductions. The artists are neither looking for the supposedly true and authentic behind the standardized images, nor for ways out of the much-lamented flood of images. Rather, with the technical instruments of the duplication and storage of “reality”, they design contradicting narratives that circulate in a field of tension between immediacy and manipulation, authenticity and fiction, present and past. The focus is particularly on the urban surfaces of our global “reality” with the codes of the private and public, standardized and individual that are inscribed therein.