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Paul Kolling: Nadir
January 27–April 21, 2024
In his works, Paul Kolling deals with current issues of economy, ecology, and the development of complex infrastructures over the past two centuries. For his exhibition Nadir at Kunstverein München, Kolling has conceived a new work that examines the history of aerial photography and the Hansa Luftbild GmbH. The development of so-called aerophotogrammetry a little over a hundred years ago led to a change in perspective from the horizontal to the vertical and required a completely new way of “reading” images. The artist traces this new or rather shifted perspective on the environment and the resulting change in the perception of space and of the self.
By using technical systems and self-written code, Kolling creates installations, sculptures, and videos that move between analog and digital space. His research-based works complicate conventional notions of recording and classifying space, confronting the viewer with the act of observing as a process governed by interests. This aspect is also inscribed into the exhibition in Munich. Here, the so-called “Luftbild-Lesebücher” (aerial photo readers), published by the Hansa Luftbild from the 1920s onwards, serve as a point of departure. They contain instructional and educational images as well as topological analyses, providing a socio-ideological framework for a development that was initially motivated purely by military objectives.
Since the First World War, aerial photographs have been a key element of both military reconnaissance and civilian aerial surveying. Through the two-dimensional and rasterized visualization of territory, knowledge of the earth’s surface increasingly became systematic knowledge of what was hidden beneath—from archaeological artifacts and natural resources to troops hidden in forests. Accordingly, photography played a central role in the technical constitution of the military gaze as well as the allocation of national and property boundaries.
In his new work of the same name as the exhibition, Kolling exposes these complex socio-political and economic relationships. The film projection shows an approximate reconstruction of a flight route by the Hansa Luftbild based on images from the aerial photo readers and is composed as a single, self-contained image that has no beginning or end. The work is screened using a modified projector and is embedded in an expansive intervention that constricts the proportions of the Kunstverein’s exhibition spaces. In Nadir, Kolling addresses the (im)possibility of documenting the world from above: views of the actual places are subjected to a reductive abstraction in order to depict the complexity of the world in a two-dimensional image. This loophole inherent in the photographic process is at the center of the Munich exhibition; the ability to read or, more precisely, the “literacy” of such images still shapes our view of/on the world today.
Schaufenster
The onsite and online series Schaufenster simultaneously presents video works in the two permanently accessible spaces of the institution—the window display facing the Hofgarten as well as the website. The series initially ran from 2019 through 2021 and resumes this January with a year-long program presenting works that explore the conditions of artistic production and the gendered self. Artist Sadie Benning recommences the series with their 1992 video work It Wasn’t Love, in which they illustrate a lustful encounter with a “bad girl” through the gender posturing and genre interplay of Hollywood stereotypes. Subsequent showings will include works by Patty Chang, Tiphanie Kim Mall, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, among others.
Archive Space
The Archive Space was established in 2020 as a permanent part of the Kunstverein. It serves as a space for the preservation and negotiation of the institution’s history alongside the reflection on the processes of historicization itself. In the year following the institution’s 200th anniversary, the space will play host to various kinds of public programs featuring artists, researchers, and contemporaries as well as the presentation of selected materials from the Kunstverein’s and other archives, including that of Constance DeJong.
Director (Interim): Gloria Hasnay
Director (Maternity Leave): Maurin Dietrich
Assistant Curator: Lucie Pia
Curatorial Project Assistant: Lea Vajda
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