27 Jun 2013

Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen presents Dominique Hurth: foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images)

DOMINIQUE HURTH
foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images)


Somewhere a curtain.
Motionless in its representation.
Captured in its own immobility.

The curtain, functionless, is just the décor for a model to be entered.
Smothering every tone and stifling all images that come and go.

(from: language in the darkness of the world through inverse images, 2012, p. 158.)



In the format of exhibitions, publications and readings Dominique Hurth is interested in the framing and reading of objects and events, folding and unfolding in non-linear manner historical narratives, that re-manifest themselves translated, abstracted and absorbed into her own visual and textual language. The starting point for new works is often a narrative present in localities or images, that find itself anew in documents, archives and exhibition displays, questioning the entity of the object in space, as accompanied by the subjective voice of personal narratives.

In foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images) Dominique Hurth creates a model for an exhibition in which images and their captions flicker and stand firm in their attempt for retinal persistence. Subjective readings and authorship merge into a display that interlaces visual and textual information, and static and moving instances in a strobe effect, flipping through the pages of a written foreword to a dream book of history. Her research on the physical manifestation of a book, collective readings and presentation sessions, creates a backdrop, a background colour to an oscillatory movement in which images vacillate between their endless (written) imprints.

The title of the exhibition refers to both her artist's book from 2012 titled language in the darkness of the world through inverse images which is a montage of images extracted from artist's own collection of material gathered throughout the years, and the structure and writing of a foreword in the format of an exhibition. Here, and in research during her stay at Büchsenhausen, Hurth questions authorship, images, captions, the flipping of pages and images, the framing of each one (in terms of space, geography and language) and the imagery (and gaps) of one's own personal memory. She quotes exhibition history and early collective reading sessions while interlacing images with an infinite loop of captions that can be attached subjectively.

The exhibition foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images) by Dominique Hurth is a production in the frame of the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen 2012–13.

Dominique HURTH (born 1985 in Colmar, F), lives in Berlin. Study at the Saint Martin's School of Art, London (BA 2005), at the Academy of Arts, Berlin (MA 2007) and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris (MA Visual Arts 2009). Fine Art Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2010-11). Latest exhibitions (selection): procreated by husband, put on ice by scientists, aroused by wife, clockwork gallery, Berlin (solo, 2013); Blackout, Look 13, Liverpool International Photography Festival, Liverpool (2013), le périmètre interne, Institut Français, Barcelona; La Triennale – Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Palais de Tokyo Paris (2012), Aber wir sind der sprache scheißegal, Archive Books Berlin (together with Scriptings, Achim Lengerer).
www.dominiquehurth.com