Exhibitions in Galerie Baer

terra (in)cognita

Falk Haberkorn (photograph/installation) und
Juliane Köhler (drawings/installation)

The topics geography and mapping is the recurrent theme throughout the oeuvre of Juliane Köhler. In this, the artist does not focus on an objective depiction of space, but on the visualisation of individual realities by means of a geographic code system. The artist uses cartography as both metaphor and symbolic means of orientation, surveying, and determining of one's own standpoint, for the construction of identity and biography. Individually experienced distances and scale of her home town are topographically incorporated by Köhler into a walk-in map, in the same manner as a thousand visited places become part of an installation. »Blinde Flecken« (i.e. blind spots) constructs unexplored areas of human desires into her biography. In her work »Gletscher und Autobahn« (i.e. glacier and motorway) at the 2003 "Profiler" exhibition, Köhler examines a causality between nature and culture which leads to cartographic changes. The process of metamorphosis, of the transformation of boundaries and maps is the artist's topic at "terra (in)cognita". The frontiers of Europe shift in »Transforming Europe«. The work »NeuesEuropa!« (i.e. new Europe) invites the spectator to redesign political Europe. The white map »Terra cognita« appears on closer examination as a relief-like, subjectively detailed world map. Finally the gallery itself becomes a world map: from an ocean on the floor run black lines on whose ends macro pictures of skin and hair, which take the shape of actual and invented islands, form the continents and slabs of this world map.

The works of photographer Falk Haberkorn seem to be very different formally, but are all based on thoughts for which the aspects of picking up trails and leaving one's traces, as well as of memory and remembrance, form important brackets. The work »Schonung« (i.e. forest plantation area), on show in 2003 at the "Silver & Gold" exhibition at the Festspielhaus Hellerau, forms part of the project »Der vergessene Wald« (i.e. the forgotten forest). Haberkorn's theatrically exaggerated staging of the forest unmasks our illusions on nature and discusses the concept "home" by means of the loss of the images correlating to that term. The photographs of the project »Auslöschung« (i.e. annihilation) presented at "terra (in)cognita" do not depict anything directly; they are mind maps of places formerly very familiar to the artist. In each case respectively, all the pictures taken in one such place were photocopied onto a single sheet of photographic paper. Although the single photographs thus are contained virtually in the (due to the addition of light) black sheet, they are, at the same time, obliterated. Working from his memory, Falk Haberkorn scratched a topographic sketch of the depicted place onto the sheets of paper. »Flecken« (i.e. spots) is part of Haberkorns work-in-progress »Berlin – Hauptstadt des 20. Jahrhunderts« (i.e. Berlin – capital of the 20th century), a personal, semi-documentary examination of the city's (more recent) history as a search for the past within the present. Public space and private sphere resemble each other in their homogeneous form and content. The specific spatial and temporal detail of the unrepeatable history of anonymous places and people is emphasised, but also levelled in the photographs.