ULRIKE HANNEMANN | 617 Garagen

Opening: Friday, 11 October 2013, 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 12 October - 9 November 2013
Finissage: Saturday, 9 November 2013, from 3 p.m.

Tree formations in the changing light of the seasons, weather-worn exterior walls, interior views with chipping paint, and niches lovingly arranged: Ulrike Hannemann in her latest series 617 Garagen explores the urban fringe area of Wittenberg where between the 1960s and 1980s countless garages were erected in the immediate vicinity of a pre-fab apartment building complex that is today pulled down again in part. Ulrike Hannemann’s photographic openings-up condense the fate of this location within many detail impressions; the focus is on the current content of the remaining garages, individual building details, and the surrounding scenery. The precisely composed pictures show isolated close-ups. At times these are traces of the current users, at times fragments of a bygone time.

Though the photographs visualize vacancy, stagnation, and decay, and raise questions about social and urban change, we see exposures before us that – over and over again anew – evade any total access, that remain in the balance. 

The artist not only builds upon a picture’s “providence” but entrusts on occasion exposures to the echo of their repetition: Thus she printed out select image motifs on different copiers and photographed them anew. The retroactive transformation thereby intersperses abstracting distance as well as the subtle appearance of the bygone. All the while the black-and-white photographs contain as if in hiding the photographer’s regard on the depicted, too, the moment after the exposure. The photographic standstill here entwines itself around different moments – not belonging to any particular time. Ulrike Hannemann’s 617 Garagen state the course of things and create in a way latent spaces of transition from things past and present to those of a yet to be defined future. Especially these peculiar states of floating affect in a provokingly creative way our memories, and our and notions of future conditions.

Birgit Effinger