Emanuel Rossetti: Stimmung / Megan Francis Sullivan: Wolkenstudie

In his work, Emanuel Rossetti (born 1987 in Basel, lives and works in Basel) explores the relationship between questions of space and the ways images are received. For his photographs, objects and sound projects, the artist uses architectural structures and landscapes, analyzing them by means of photographic and installation-based processes in which the principle of composition plays a key role. His landscape photographs, usually in series, are made at locations on the urban periphery or in the countryside. On walks, he takes pictures that criticize the antithesis between town and country, developing new compositions to abolish this distinction.

For Stimmung, Rossetti developed series of large-format photographs taken in different places over a period of two years. The pictures were shot with a fish-eye lens, rendering the landscape as a circular image surrounded by black. The edges of the image are distorted, underlining a certain complexity that is also emphasized by the serial composition, causing Rossetti’s expanded concept of landscape to appear as an interface between multiple spaces.

In another series, Rossetti works with stereoscopy, a sidetrack in the history of photography. When looking at the objects made using this technique, viewers can observe their own sense of spatial perception at work, as they see two images at once.

In German, the word Stimmung has several meanings. It can be a subjective mood, or the atmosphere in a landscape. There is a liminal quality here, as the dividing line between inner perception and what is seen remains unclear, the two merging into one another. At the same time, Stimmung also refers to the tuning of sounds.

On May 10 and 11, in an event realized jointly with Stefan Tcherepnin, with whom Rossetti runs the Staged Worlds project, a public rehearsal in the exhibition space, in which all are invited to participate, will be followed by a performance.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an interview pamphlet with a text by Emanuel Rossetti and Melanie Ohnemus.

Megan Francis Sullivan (born 1975 in Stamford, Connecticut; lives and works in Berlin) deals with the question of what art is and how its forms convey meaning, exploring both the auratic constitution of individual works and the relationships they enter into on different levels: temporal and spatial, literal and referential, economic and ecological. These questions of relation are underlined by shifts in production strategies and through the combinations of works, creating tensions between original and copy, situation and reference, concrete object and abstract thought. Objects and relationships entwine to create an exhibition scenario that does not serve to exemplify predetermined concepts and genre-based classifications, but rather opens up the space between such definitions. The context itself becomes the material and in this movement reveals itself in both its stabilizing and fragile effect.

For Wolkenstudie (Cloud Study), Sullivan has developed works that incorporate local content, such as historical drawings from the textile industry or landscape paintings by Johann Gottfried Steffan from the collection of the Glarner Kunstverein. The show also includes new studies of Hans Haacke’s Condensation Wall (1963-64/2014) and Adolph Menzel’s Wolkenstudie (1851), as well a model of the facade of the 1990s New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co. By processing various technological and cultural moments as an operational study in itself, an intermediate zone arises in which the meeting of these works offers shifting ontological impressions of each.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an interview pamphlet with a text by Megan Francis Sullivan and Melanie Ohnemus.