Productive Image Interference

Artists: Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Max Schulze, Avery Singer

Fake news with manipulated images, virtual reality, an endless universe of increasingly widespread JPEG and GIF images: we have long lived with the awareness that we cannot believe our eyes and that images, whether they were created manually or with advanced technology, do not so much depict reality as play a major role in shaping it themselves—including transmission errors, degradation of quality, hacks, and other forms of interference. When Sigmar Polke was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1960s, his interest quickly turned to contemporary images from mass media. The transmission, interference, transforming, and recoding of these images, including their resulting or revealed flaws, became the subject and early trademark of his raster pictures.

To mark the 80th anniversary of Sigmar Polke’s birth, the Anna Polke Foundation initiated the project Productive Image Interference with the aim of connecting Polke’s work to current discourses about images and the media and thus opening up new perspectives on it. Together with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the foundation is realizing an exhibition that brings Sigmar Polke together with current artistic positions. The exhibition will be accompanied by a multi-day festival at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which will bring academic and artistic contributions into a dialog. The anniversary project is under the patronage of Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, Minister of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, and is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW, and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

The project focuses on a central aspect in Sigmar Polke’s oeuvre: his use of existing images based on appropriation and sampling. This is reflected in the title Productive Image Interference, which is understood both as a technique and as an artistic method used by Polke, which not only challenges viewers’ perception, but also has a crucial impact on the production of contemporary art.

The works by contemporary international artists show new techniques and methods that emphasize that forms of visual interference remain a productive starting point for creative work today in the negotiation of artistic, cultural, and political issues. The exhibition will illuminate this common attitude toward images in the three following chapters (named after Polke’s works): “You can see what it is.” poses the question of the use and truth value of images and focuses on the political potential of visual interference. “History of Everything” focuses on existing, circulating images as sources and templates for the production of new images and artworks. “Desastres und andere bare Wunder” concentrates on the existence and effectiveness of the materials themselves, which lead to interference in images in a variety of ways.

The negatively connoted word “interference” is reinterpreted: at the latest since the 1960s, destructive processes have proven to be a central category of artistic production. The anniversary project focuses on this shift and highlights the enduring significance and relevance of Polke’s thinking and work.

The exhibition is curated by Kathrin Barutzki and Nelly Gawellek (both from the Anna Polke Foundation) along with Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).

An exhibition catalog will be published by Distanz, designed by Petra Hollenbach & Thomas Spallek, with artistic and art historical contributions, which will be available on site at the Kunsthalle and in the online store from the exhibition opening.