26.04.–08.07.2012
Kabinett

Susanne M. Winterling

In The Inscribable Surface Susanne M. Winterling continued her ongoing meditation on the cinematic by returning to its most fundamental gesture: the frame. She explored this across a range of objects, including a series of C-prints, a 16mm film projection, and an iPad. In each of these, the act of enframing unfolded as an encounter with an image, tenuous in its becoming and essentially dependent on the human gesture. Whether it is in the film in which the camera’s zoom turns the lit surface into a three-dimensional object or through the section on the iPad’s surface that defines the movements of jellyfish in the Greenpeace aquarium.

The appearance of light underscores the materiality of the media devices or the productions captured in the image. This poetic appearance of a contrived image emphasizes both the singularity and beauty of each individual technology as well as the act of viewing. It is a deconstructive negotiation between two materialities, that of the device and that of the photographic surface, in which the human gesture stands out as a constant center in a world flooded with images.

Susanne M. Winterling’s goal was to investigate the poetry and politics of visual culture as well as the cinematic history. She connected form and content in the esthetic production to look for other perspectives and ways of life that incorporate the subjective, rather than simplifying complexity in the perception and of the portrayal. The artist tried to find alternative paths for an analysis of the historical using techniques of comparison, reflection, and montage that also engaged with the space and invited the viewer to make connections between the individual arrangements and images. As changes in meaning and perspectives in the microcosm can cause changes for example in life forms, materiality and surface, history and the personal were incorporated into the space. It was a delicate undertaking that calls forth the legacy of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers and the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, among others.

All works courtesy the artist und
Silverman gallery San franscisco

Susanne M. Winterling, born 1970 in Rehau, lives and works in Berlin and Oslo
www.susannewinterling.de