Friday April 27, 2012
In Das Handwerk, photographer and co-founder of school Yasmina Haddad brings together the series a boy’s best friend is always his mother (2011/12), digital slides, about 40 portraits of young men in glorifying black-and-white projection, based on the final sequence of Hitchcock’s much-quoted „Psycho“ and therein Anthony Perkins' diabolic smile, a loose sketch of poses. In compositional affinity of the cinematic still image to the photographed (re-)production, the men depicted seem to be in a demanding state of in-between of ceaseless emersion from nowhere and their incomprehensible state of self, where, in addition, leftovers from adolescence and presentiments of masculinity become visible in ambiguous balance, and the inevitability of social role-seeking is depicted in allegoric ways. Breaking with the iconographic original, the moment of conflict in the subject, where he would find his space between past and future history, is captured photographically, performing with it the complexity of circumstances and shifting relations of the photographic image to its non-pictorial reference. Also in the context of the exhibition with its post-minimal and conceptual approaches, a simple loop (on photography, 2011) where, through subtle turnaround, imaginativeness and configuration of senses are triggered in the audience, and where this loop also seems to be assigned with meaning when it escapes from assignability and comprehensibility within a certain cultural order, and when above all the perceiving eye tries to force and „correct“ the depicted woman into an active performing role. The photo Das Handwerk, referencing the title of the exhibition, may, against the background of expanding digital imagery and its massive illusionistic potentials, appear as a false cementation and reflexive attempt of a photographic outline of medial high-speed. (Christian Egger, Übersetzung: A. Lumplecker)
