Rolf Sachsse

 

Liquid Spaces: Media spaces in the work of Gudrun Kemsa

 

Anyone who looks at Gudrun Kemsa‘s street pictures taken in Düsseldorf, London, Berlin and other metropolises around the world is immediately reminded of the fluid modernity of the historian Zygmunt Bauman: people stand and sit isolated, at most in groups of two; they look into an indeterminate distance or at their smartphones, they are individual in habitus and clothing and thus do not represent society; the stage of their appearance - the sidewalk in the old sense of the word as a ‚sidewalk‘ - has no relation to the displays of the stores visible behind them. Bauman describes the liquefaction of the modern through processes of the dissolution of previously fixed conditions of society; the view shifts from the ‚macro‘ of living together to the ‚micro‘ of individuals, just as the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz described, a decade and a half later, in his „Society of Singularities“. Gudrun Kemsa‘s images correspond to the liquefaction - and thus also the dissolution of boundaries of space through the use of media: even when the young men are standing in front of the flagship store of a media company, their gaze on their own smartphone has nothing to do with the business premises (p.18). Precisely because the camera statically delimits the space, all movements in it are reduced to the smallest detail, and these micro-events have no connection to one another, except that they have ended up in this picture. This is where Gudrun Kemsa‘s art is revealed. What can be seen in her pictures creates - with Michel Foucault heterotopic - a strange imaginary space of what could be if one were standing there as a viewer. The fluidity of such spaces consists of the smallest particles in chaotic permanent movement; regardless of how strict, narrow and contained the outer frame may be. A hint of this movement is visible in Gudrun Kemsa‘s videos, which are based on similarly strict spatial specifications.

 

Here the artist creates completely different, equally fluid pictorial spaces, but now through her own movement, in which she allows the camera to participate. Precise traversals of spaces - primarily public, often well-known - are recorded, with the movement running horizontally, mostly straight, rarely in a predefined curve.Once again, the space is liquid, but this time the liquefaction of the spatial is the product of a media technique, not part of a motif. Here, Gudrun Kemsa photographically reinvents landscape painting and reduces it to one essential aspect: the frame of the picture is set arbitrarily, but the depicted landscape can be infinitely extended in the viewer‘s mind to all sides, but above all to the right and left. Here, the picture frame only limits the fluidity of the space, but in two ways: on the one hand as a temporal limitation of the artist‘s shot, and on the other as a retracing movement of the eyes when looking at the finished work of art. Mikhail M. Bakhtin once described this other pictorial space, which is just as liquid in its temporality, as chronotopos and considered it equally decisive for all media products. In the interweaving of a recognizability of the pictorial motifs - based on memory and their moving depiction - indeterminable in speed - the often large-format works prove to be radically modern, because they lead back to experiences of motion that are only available in the modern age: Railroads, bicycles, skateboards and other linear means of transportation.

 

The movement becomes even more radical in the vertical, as in the ‚Forest‘ images by Gudrun Kemsa. Although the observation of a forest corresponds to the vertical shift of the gaze from below to above and back again, the pulling along of a camera is irritating here - an effect requently used in film history to depict something uncanny. It has in turn entered the theory of computer games as a chronotopos where it is used to construct dramatic elements as a spatial experience in the course of the game. In terms of the physiology of perception, vertical movements are always perceived as unsettling; for the savannah-running prehistoric man, danger always lurks at the bottom or at the top, while the horizon - as long as it is visible - enables orientation in the landscape. Even if the ‚Forest‘ pictures have been taken in the best sunlight and radiate cheerfully in yellow-brown tones, they remain exciting because the space in them is liquefied in a way that does not correspond to everyday behavioural expectations.

 

The opposite is the case on the seashore: everything is calm, everything is fluid, and occasionally the horizon blurs. This corresponds exactly to Stefanie Wenner‘s image, which emphasizes the horizon as itself not spatial, but as an inescapable boundary of one‘s own perception, precisely the physicality of the viewer. The paradox that we cannot know what lies beyond the horizon and yet find it reassuring once again liquefies the space in Gudrun Kemsa‘s pictures. What is more, she chooses to shoot at twilight, that intermediate realm between day and night, which is romanticized in photography. It is precisely here that the liquid nature of the space experiences an abrupt limitation: the respective light situation only exists for a few minutes and must be captured precisely then. The camera - and with it the artist - remains in motion, another paradox, because it is precisely the movement that creates a calm image. This applies above all to the sky, which presents itself as a chromatic sequence of colours and refers to a long heritage of painting from Matthias Grünewald to Caspar David Friedrich to Raimer Jochims or Jef Verheyen.

 

In Gudrun Kemsa‘s wide-ranging interests, liquid media spaces can also be defined by their use, and so she has repeatedly dealt with medially over-formed spaces such as tourist resorts within her own work development. Here, she has moved horizontally in a tried and tested manner, thus acting against the intended use of the spaces as quiet zones; in return, the spaces are also deserted and often also photographed at dusk. In the video works that have always accompanied these images, further spatial forms now appear, which at first do not seem like a liquefaction of the media image, but are hardly less tangible than liquid forms: Here, branches and leaves are mirrored kaleidoscope-like, moving continuously towards and away from each other, temporally and spatially without beginning or end.

 

At the end of the journey through this book, however, Gudrun Kemsa returns to where photography‘s struggle for recognition as a fine art began, in the view of light and shadow on water surfaces. After 1945, Otto Steinert began to introduce photography into art via contemporary abstraction with just such motifs - and many of his students have followed in his footsteps. However, Gudrun Kemsa‘s pictures are colourful, often bright, clearly defined in their temporality, and thus prima vista completely different from Steinert‘s attempts at subjective design. They share the endlessness of the possible pictorial space with similar motifs in Detlef Orlopp‘s work. Orlopp was neither concerned with colour nor explicitly with light events because his interest was in sharply defined surfaces, i.e. clearly defined pictorial spaces. For Gudrun Kemsa, the old motifs of photography itself now also remain in a media space. As an artist, she reflects the history of the medium in her work - and also allows this space to remain fluid, unlimited and ready for any new form.

 

¹    Bauman, Zygmunt: Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press 2000, p. 7.

²    Reckwitz, Andreas: Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag 2019.

³  Foucault, Michel: Andere Räume, in: Barck, Karlheinz; Gente, Peter; Paris, Heide; Richter, Stefan (Hg.): Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Leipzig: Reclam Verlag 1990, p. 34-46.

⁴  Kemsa, Gudrun: Bewegte Bilder, Köln: Markus Schaden Verlag 2003.

⁵  Bachtin, Michail M.: Chronotopos, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1973 (Berlin 2014).

⁶  Bonner, Marc: Offene-Welt-Strukturen. Architektur, Stadt- und Naturlandschaft im Computerspiel, Marburg: Büchner-Verlag 2023, p. 693-718.

⁷  Wenner, Stefanie: Die Atopie des Horizonts und die Erweiterung des Hier. Medienphilosophische Erkundungen, in: Schade, Sigrid, Thomas Sieber, Thomas, Tholen, Georg Christoph (ed.): SchnittStellen, Basler Beiträge zur Medienwissenschaft Band 1, Basel: Schwabe Verlag 2005, p. 379-388.

⁸  Sachsse, Rolf: Kunstfotografisches Zwielicht. Eine kleine Geschichte der Dämmerungsfotografie, in: Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 23. Jg. 2003, Heft 89, p. 3-12.

⁹  Schönegg, Kathrin: Fotografiegeschichte der Abstraktion, Köln:  Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König (Diss. phil. Konstanz) 2019, p. 271.

¹⁰ Ebner, Florian (ed.): Exhibition catalog. Detlef Orlopp, Nur die Nähe – auch die Ferne, Fotografien, Göttingen: Steidl 2015, p. 73-115.

 

 

 

in: Floating Spaces - Gudrun Kemsa, Verlag Kettler, Dortmund, 2024, S.87.