The work contextiles was created in the summer of 2022 as part of the semester project adaption____reaktion in the photography focus of communication design at the BURG with Stephanie Kiwitt. The task was to develop an adaption___reaction to a work by photographers stored in the Moritzburg Halle archive. During a poster exhibition in retail stores on Schmeerstraße, the chosen image by Hans Finsler was set in reaction to my work and thus made accessible to the citizens of Halle (see image on the right).
Contextiles deals with the search for the emotion of the trigger and the motive, as well as the admission that the textile is that which moves me most. The textile appears almost everywhere in my work. The colorfulness, the shine, the structure and especially the composition and combination delight me in many moments. Textile, however, does not remain for itself, but only in context so secure, reverent, casual, elated, serene, delightful, playful, surprising, familiar, ecstatic, soothing and mysterious.
The images shown were taken in May 2022 at events such as concerts, birthdays and a music festival. For the latter, I was also able to set up the textile installation zvuws, which can occasionally be seen in the images. Since I worked out a reaction to Hans Finsler for the poster exhibition, the further work remains inspired by this discussion. While Hans Finster coined the new vision of the 20s a good 100 years ago, he was interested in draping fabric as a material, staging and extracting the essence of the fabric. In a way that was very experimental at the time, he developed images with a lot of contrast, diagonals and modified focus ratios that seemed progressive and technophile. From today's perspective, this applied photography seems to me immanent in numerous web stores of textile manufacturers.
In my reaction, I deliberately show the textile not as a product image, but in everyday living use. Here motifs are precisely observed and not draped. In most sociable situations, the image is created in a conscious going out of the moment and for their own emotional experience.
The mixture of color and black and white images makes it clear that the textile experience is not constituted by colorfulness. On the one hand, color allows a lot of mood to emerge on its own, and thus can compete with texture, composition, and luster. On the other hand, color allows for a very joyfully playful way to contextualize images. Thus, the work shows such a constellation of photos defined by their colorfulness, texture, emotion, gloss, contrast or composition. In four frames of 70x100cm inkjet prints, the individual photos are so accurately assembled that the individual motifs correspond with all the others in their constellation. An important aspect is always the dialectic, which not only presents the emotional experience as a pure moment of happiness, but is also critically questioned. On the one hand, this dialectic is developed in the pictures but also through the deliberate contrasting constellation.
Technique: Photography (analog + digital)
Material: Inkjet on photo paper
Size: 4x 100x70cm
Year: 2022
