“RAW” at Kunst im Tunnel

A cacophonous, factory-floor soundscape rattling throughout the stark, concrete partitions of Kunst im Tunnel is the purpose of entry into “RAW.” Because the title suggests, the exhibition’s 5 artists take deconstructed approaches to photographic media, starting with Johannes Raimann’s Sharpener (all works cited, 2023), a looped seven-minute video wherein repetitive pictures of a spreadsheet, a Battleship grid, a telephone e book, and a black-and-white take a look at sample slowly pan throughout the display. Backed by Florian Siebenhaar’s industrial acoustic surroundings, a dialogue unfolds between analog and digital applied sciences wherein the digicam each captures and flattens real-time data.

Across the nook, Ulrike Kazmaier’s work equally abstracts visible data by means of strategies of lossy compression. CMYK blows up a single element of a Dürer print, and her sculpture Probably Perhaps (Ultramarine) unfurls in a fleshy archipelago of “glitches” throughout the wall, each revealing metadata of seemingly preexisting figurative varieties. Dylan Maquet’s pair of monumental Drained Work—sheer materials stretched over metal frames gently drooping towards the wall—characteristic a collage of out-of-focus iPhone snapshots digitally printed onto mesh textiles. Right here and in Sabrina Podemski’s prismatic sculpture sequence “Vertigo,” the “display” takes on a number of connotations, a clean canvas or a black mirror holding an immaterial archive.

Moritz Riesenbeck’s set up Auflösung (translated as “dissolution” or “clearance”) locations the viewer in a special time and place—a fraction of a room furnished with a naked foldout mattress and a Seventies built-in wardrobe bought from a Rhineland property sale. A close-by audio recording and chapbook narrate vignettes from an individual’s life, the inexactitudes of which allude to the psychological results of dementia, suggesting how recollections could be embedded in an object, like {a photograph}, albeit imperfectly.

Collectively, the works in “RAW,” coupled with the bunker-like environment of Kunst im Tunnel, represent a coolly apocalyptic imaginative and prescient of technological obsolescence inflected by a hopeful reimagining of the indexical. These artists’ delicate interventions converse to what’s misplaced inside modes of digital overproduction by means of latent photos of the bodily. In an period of hypervisuality and seamless simulacra, it appears apt to return to pictures by means of its constituent components.

— Re’al Christian