Astrid Busch, Alexandra Schumacher, Pleasure Beach (Berlin)
April 24th – May 23rd, 2009
Opening April 24th 2009, 7-9pm
“Images” transport us to strange places. As remote as the yellowed photographs of our grandparents may seem to us, they undeniably contain elements of past experience. We are confronted here by people removed in unknown narratives and experiences.
“Images” occupy a node between direct perception and memories blurred in the sequential dynamic of time. Regarding the earliest photographs, Walter Benjamin speaks of a lost “aura” of the real, of mechanically dissected experience. For him the aura is permeated by a “distance, however close it may be,” by the human history present in places and situations. And it is precisely this “authenticity” of the past, deeply rooted in human experience, that loses itself for Benjamin in a worldly wisdom conveyed solely by technology.
Yet is it not necessary to reevaluate this analysis from a contemporary perspective?
It has always been the problematic and the power of memories and stories that they are part of our perceptions, that they are inscribed in our experience. It does not even have to be personal views that determine our lives, that shape our reality. Hollywood movies were not the first to show us that entire nations arise in the charged field of self-created myths, entire cities in the “imaginary spaces” of invented narratives.
This “distance, however close it may be”—perhaps we are learning, precisely in this age marked by technological media, a new way of understanding concepts like that of the “aura.” The “sites” of the imaginary, the “spaces” in which humans creatively position themselves, one might argue from this perspective, are still closer to us than the “proclaimers” of the unleashed media would have us believe.
