Exhibitions in Galerie Baer

Orte/Unorte

Inga Paas and Benno Hinkes -
photography and installation

Opening on 28th of february 2004 during the Vernissageday Dresden with an introduction by Matthias Wagner at 7 p.m.

Photographer Inga Paas explores in her photographs the relations and functions of human beings and the places surrounding them. While doing so, her approach is project-oriented, documentary, matter-of-fact and serial, owning formally, to some extent, to the Becher-school. No individually, artificially generated lighting falsifies her interpretation of her motifs and concepts. The monumentality and anonymity of the places and architectures is broken down with their opposite narrative element, the image of the individuals.
For the project "people & places", developed in Scandinavia in 1999, the artist photographed the protagonists at the very site where she first happened to meet them. In each case, these places refer to the occupations of the depicted. With her 2002/03 urban space project "Menschen und ihre Orte" (i.e. “People and Their Places"), Inga Paas took matters one step further, showing people in Dresden in their favourite or most-loathed locations respectively. By erecting these photographs (at the actual locations) without explanatory comments, the usually rather cursory perception of environments was transformed into their being consciously examined. In a first instance, the spectator has to establish a relationship of his or her own to the specific site, has to make sense of it in all its significant features and allow it to sink in, before being able to find a narrative to go with the portrayed person. Thus, Paas invests anonymous cityscapes with human experiences.

Benno Hinkes produces architectonic space installations some of which stand detached from any surroundings, and others which are inbuilt into existing spaces. For these accessible space installations which retain a vivid character, Hinkes uses aesthetic and trivial present-day forms. But appearances are deceptive: at second sight, Hinkes' spaces are exposed as possessing no function at all, as non-spaces. "Profiler" exhibits the model of a house with no windows, door handle missing, the terrace offering a view into the nowhere, the house itself stands in no realistic proportion to its environment.