Matthias Dachwald

 

FLOATING SPACES

 

“I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed (…) I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, lack of completeness, or whatever.”

Gerhard Richter¹

 

 

I. Photography

 

Picturesque images of an early autumn forest landscape in impressionistic colours. Yellowish, reddish and green leaves moved by the wind. Tree trunks out of focus, pushing vertically into the picture frame. There does not seem to be an edge; the picture opens the imaginary view out to the left and right, both upwards and downwards. The viewer is standing still, so to speak, at the heart of the scene; they are immersed, becoming a part of the forest landscape. This photo book focuses on the work cycle Forest from 2023. It is Gudrun Kemsa’s most recent group of works and her latest experiment in capturing moving images as photographs. For this cycle, she no longer moves the camera horizontally, as she did previously, to simulate the eye roving across the landscape; the movement is now vertical, i.e. from top to bottom or vice versa. The effect generated is strikingly different from the horizontal movement and not only adds to the artist’s creative possibilities, but also leads to a totally new perception of the pictorial space for the viewer. Instead of the dynamic impression arising when we look at the landscape from a simulated horizontal movement, like from a train or car, when the view itself seems to be „passing by“, as it were, the camera’s vertical motion creates a more meditative yet still vibrant impression of movement. It is as if we can truly hear the rustling of the leaves, the sighing of the trees; on the visual level, meanwhile, the image appears more painterly with its ‘blurred’ abstraction than it does from the dynamic of horizontally frozen movement. Gudrun Kemsa plays with our perception, she expands our viewing habits, and she is always looking for fresh possibilities using the means of photography and video.

 

The artist studied sculpture under Karl Bobek and David Rabinowitch at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she came into close contact with photography. Initially, it may seem unusual for a sculptor to be the creator of such outstanding photographic images. Taking a closer look at the time of her studies in Düsseldorf from 1980 to 1990, it is perhaps no longer such a surprise. Bernd and Hilla Becher were teaching in a parallel class at the time, and obviously students talked among themselves. It is likely that no other artistic medium was so markedly in the air back then as photography, especially in Düsseldorf. In the 1980s/90s, Germany also began to take photography seriously as an artistic medium in its own right. As Kemsa had already been trained in photography by her former art teacher and, she herself says, received some very important stimulus from Professor Theissing at the Academy, it is perhaps only logical that she translated her sculptural perception of space into photography and the moving image. Especially as Gerhard Richter also taught at the Academy in a parallel class; he had linked his painterly work closely to photography at a very early stage. Kemsa’s interests in questioning the construction of vision and expanding the sphere of perception are intertwined stylistically in her work: The artist finds Floating Spaces, like those in this photo book, in urban and natural landscapes, in architecture, the forest, the sea, the sky, and in the border areas between them.

 

 

II. Stage Space

 

Anyone aware of Gudrun Kemsa’s previous work will be familiar with her adaptations of urban space: Street photography in the broadest sense of the term. Gudrun Kemsa is not interested in documenting life on the street like Garry Winogrand or Henri Cartier-Bresson, nor does she wish to depict architecture like Lucia Moholy-Nagy in her Bauhaus photographs. Instead, she is interested in viewing the city as a stage and observing how characters, architecture and light interrelate on this stage. If we understand the city – and above all, the metropolis – as a space for social exchange and the coexistence of many heterogeneous social groups, then it becomes the setting for the negotiation of major communicative processes. Most street photography refers to the clashes in concentrated vitality with all its diversity. We find none of this in Gudrun Kemsa’s images. Her pictures of the city reveal an almost painful lack of communication. The people appearing in her photographs are subjects who have little or nothing to do with each other. They seem to have fallen into the images by chance, as if they have no idea what they are supposed to be doing wherever they find themselves – indeed, as if they do not belong there at all. In the photo Berlin, Friedrichstraße 02, dating from 2020, the central figure in front of the ‘Mauermuseum’ is the prototype of such city dwellers. Is he waiting, searching for, or watching something? We do not know. The image does not accentuate any of its figures (and this alone distinguishes it from classic street photography), i.e. it is deeply neutral, and the man in the centre only becomes the focal point of the image because he is standing right there in the middle. He is there by chance, and at the centre by chance. A version of our modern lifestyle? We are there, and that is precisely why we are the focus (for ourselves) and yet we are only one or one among many? So, while we are focussed on ourselves in late modernity, the world passes us by. Another core element of street photography is its randomness, but Kemsa’s images lack this characteristic. On the contrary, everything seems to be constructed and staged without the participants being aware of any staging. In her essay in this book, Sabine Maria Schmidt points out that the city is a projection surface and that people turn into a space-constituting factor in the artist’s photos. At the same time, the public spaces are manifest ´as an “urban style”² that has become internationally homogeneous’ – no matter whether in New York, London or Düsseldorf – as a kind of stereotype: “Everything in this world seems to have become transparent, the visions of modernity a reality.”³ The staged images that Gudrun Kemsa offers us with her photographs in big cities play out in front of transparent, reflective surfaces with sharp edges. Photographs with little depth. They show and adapt the shiny surfaces of the consumer world, in which people are mere extras. Theatre, genuinely representing the subject of the stage, deals with literary texts that are performed by actors. The urban stage that Gudrun Kemsa presents is not based on a literary model but on that of the consumer world and on movement. In addition to the reflecting surfaces of the temples of merchandise, the transit locations of the big city, the railway stations, are a frequent stage for her images. Time itself comes into focus in their architectural grids and rhythms. Trains come and go, people board and leave the means of transport – and wait. Everything in such places is designed to ensure that people only stay there for a short time. The aim is to get away as quickly as possi-ble. Temporariness and motion are inscribed into these places, therefore, and people behave accordingly. A relationship to others (waiting) is not evident in these pictures, either. Most of the passers-by are standing beside others but with no connection. While we read these ‘melting points’ sociologically as the beating hearts of social existence, the artist’s photographs expose them as interim spaces of unrelated people and things.

 

 

III. Light

 

Light, space and movement are the key elements in Gudrun Kemsa’s work. The stage that Gudrun Kemsa sets in her street photographs is bathed in glistening light. “Above all, it is the light that generates the formal structural element, as if the architecture is obliged to subordinate itself to the light”,⁴ Sabine Maria Schmidt writes in her essay and so pinpoints the significance given to the light in Kemsa’s images. Working with light is central to her photography, perhaps even the origin of her photography per se. During her stay in Rome in 1993, she observed the movement of the sun and the changes that light brings to a space when it is captured in photographs taken at different times. These studies of the Pantheon, initially taken in black and white, were soon followed by a deliberate use of sunlight in her photographs. During her stay at Villa Massimo in 1996/97, she worked with colour photography and video and observed the sunlight on the columns of St. Peter’s Basilica. She took the later street images of New York in late summer, in the afternoon when the shadows lengthen and the sun is very low due to the time of year, when its light falls into the chasms formed by the streets. The shots from Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne and London adopt the same approach. The sun’s function resembles that of a theatre spotlight, illuminating the stage for Kemsa’s photography. The light in the series of coastal and seaside photographs is utterly different to that in her street photography. While she seeks the harsh contrasts of light and shadow in the street photography, the colouration of the sunset is the image-defining means of expression in the photographs taken by the sea. The colours of sky and sea both blur in a similar way from the top and bottom edges of the image towards the horizon. Of course, this effect is created by the sky reflecting on the water, but at the same time such reflection is cancelled out by the blurring of the moving water surface. The horizon is the main focal point. In his essay, Rolf Sachsse refers to the horizon as an inescapable limit to our perception. For Gudrun Kemsa, who wishes to explore to the very limits of perception, this realisation must be agonising – and yet perhaps this visually inherent limit is acceptable in the vastness of these photographs?

 

What the colours of sunset still seem to conceal is revealed by the seascapes Bensersiel 2, 9 and 12, which have a monochrome-seeming, pale grey-blue hue: Space! The viewer is not distracted from this space in any way, there are no exaggeratedly aggressive colours, no movement to divert our attention, no human being draws the eye. Just a surface, structured by a few lines. As recipients, we enter the pictorial space and so make contact with the space and ourselves. What the scenes of Urban Stages seem to deny their figures, namely communication, now begins to unfold – in the image free of people – precisely because our concentration is directed towards a distraction-free space, which can become open to dialogue. One is almost reminded of Arno Schmidt’s exclamation “rather a heaven without gods than without clouds!” – in our case a blanket of clouds with the greatest imaginable regularity.

 

 

IV. Movement

 

The sea’s even surface adapts the expanse of the sky, although the sea itself is constantly in motion. However, as the photographer also moves the camera, from a rotation of her body, the movement of the sea is cancelled out and transformed into a surface at rest. In her work, Gudrun Kemsa oscillates between the moving image of the video and the static image of the photograph, whereby she seems to record exactly what would seem specific to the other apparatus in terms of their technical possibilities. With camera in hand, she moves vertically and horizontally, hovering and circling to set the world in the picture in motion, while with the video camera she remains static and simply allows the world to move. But these two artistic processes provide her with a section of reality that seems to follow its own aesthetic laws and completely fulfils the artist’s aim to expand the horizon of perception.

 

The way that Gudrun Kemsa models space, light and movement in the image makes it seem that she has added a further nuance to photography and video – or as if she has transferred sculptural modelling to photography. She constructs pictorial space, chisels at structures with light, and liquefies static forms through movement. Form thus takes centre stage in the photograph, the details dissolve and become unimportant. Despite the blurring, we see things more clearly, paradoxical as that may sound. And urban space, still occupied by luxury shops at first glance, allows the concept of the space as a stage set – including the characters – to come the fore when we take a second look. Arcs of tension are created between the characters, the architecture and the lighting effects. In the videos, the continuing uniform movement of the film mutates into a single image, or creates almost surrealistic forms based on very real images – and again, that may sound paradoxical. Gudrun Kemsa’s work abstracts photography and video using the means of photography and film to expand the recipient’s perception. The means she selects are intrinsic to her equipment’s technical possibilities. Her conceptual approach, however, appears to stem from the compositional principles of three-dimensional bodies, as in sculpture. And thus, we come full circle.

 

 

¹    Gerhard Richter. Text. Schriften und Interviews, ed. by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Leipzig and

    Frankfurt a.M. 1993, p. 69.

²    Sabine Maria Schmidt, The city as a stage, 2013 (2024), p. 30ff

³    ibid.

⁴    ibid.

⁵    Rolf Sachsse, LIQUID SPACES: Media Spaces in the work of Gudrun Kemsa, 2024, p. 86.

 

⁶    From: Arno Schmidt, Gardir oder Erkenne Dich selbst, 1949

 

 

in: Floating Spaces - Gudrun Kemsa, Verlag Kettler, Dortmund, 2024, S.14.

 

Übersetzung: Lucinda Rennison, Lektorat: Stephanie Braun, Matthias Dachwald