Janaina Tschäpe
19 Jan - 25 Mar 2006
JANAINA TSCHAPE
DREAM IMAGES - on Janaina Tschäpe’s photography
Kristine Kern, December 2005
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
Sigmund Freud
German-born visual artist Janaina Tschäpe works in the median between the poetic and the bizarre. She creates visually fascinating images, at once captivating and uncanny – the latter in the sense best conveyed by the German word unheimlich. Tschäpe works with photography, drawing, film and installation. For her, it is not so much the medium itself as what it can be used for that is important. It is more about what she wants to say with a particular work and, here, the form or means of expression she decides to utilize is often a part of the work’s meaning, as is the case in a number of drawings in which reflections upon the medium and the process are integrated into the finished work.
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is very filmic, virtually regardless of the medium in which she expresses herself and, even though there are also clear references to performance and body art, there often seem to be cinematic considerations at play. Tschäpe also works with an understated narration in a number of works – traces of a story that is never developed but simply exists as a conception of the picture’s before and after: Only the contours of a story are hinted at, as we are seemingly introduced to a fragment of a larger tale.
FILMIC PHOTOGRAPHY
Janaina Tschäpe is showing three photographic series at Bo Bjerggaard: Dreamstructure, Botanica and 100 Little Deaths; and it is especially in the last-named series that Tschäpe works with filmic staging and narrative traces. On the whole, the series, which consists of nine pictures from 1998 – 99, presents the same motif in different stagings or scenarios. A young woman (the artist herself) is seen lying on her stomach in otherwise deserted surroundings. Has there been an accident, has she fallen, perhaps? Or has there been a violent attack? We do not know, and the pictures supply no answer. The scenario seems to be the culmination of a dramatic event. We perceive some prior suspense; but, since we do not know the antecedent history, the viewer is left with an open ending in the sense that it is up to the individual to imagine the sequence of events that has led to the occurrence, i.e., the woman’s “fall.” Furthermore, since the photographs are quite filmically staged in their composition, lighting, etc., we immediately think in terms of a narrative, filmic context. The pictures could be – and are presumably consciously staged as – stills from a feature film. At any rate, the use of filmic codes has the effect that we involuntarily read the motifs within a cinematic framework.
Like, for example, American artist Cindy Sherman’s “calendar girl” pictures from the early 1980s, women in Tschäpe’s pictures are presented as victims. Yet, whereas, in Sherman, it seems clear that the women have been subjected to violence, the situation is a little more uncertain in Tschäpe. There is no social agenda or gender politics here, since the uncertainty surrounding the event presented seems to be the very theme of the pictures. Instead of giving an answer, Tschäpe’s photographs raise more questions.
LES FLEURS DU MAL
The flower motif has a long tradition in the history of art, particularly in the form of the still life, and Janaina Tschäpe continues this tradition with her Botanica series from 2005 – the most recent of the three photo series. It is natural, therefore, to view the photographs as sort of “memento mori” motifs, emphasized by the duality of the uncanny and the beautiful that characterizes the pictures and by the almost inscrutable darkness lurking in the background of each. Like some sort of Baudelarian flowers of evil, the plants emerge from the darkness, oddly iridescent in their exoticism. The pictures present an unfamiliar, artificial nature, which is why they seem “alien” – perhaps, a bit frightening. In contrast to, for example, the work of the Swiss artistic duo Fischli & Weiss, Untitled (Flowers) from 1997 - 98, in which plants are rather investigated through the banality of their cyclical growth, Tschäpe focuses on the strangeness of flowers, and their symbolic function becomes completely different. In Tschäpe, the flower is a curiosity, something decadent and artificial in nature, which represents what is different, what is not every day, the unheimliche.
PERFORMATIVE BODY PICTURES
The last of the three series, Dreamstructure from 2002, is linked directly to the feminist body and performance art of the 1970s in which the female body was used as a tool for (gender) political statements but presents, at the same time, an updated, slightly self-ironic perspective on the problems surrounding female self-representation and the representation of women generally. In Janaina Tschäpe’s photographs, we see a young woman with long, dark hair, almost hidden in a huge inflatable structure of white material. It looks like something between a dress and a tent or, perhaps, a costume of some sort. The photographs are stills from a video and, when we look at them, we get – without doubt, quite consciously from the artist’s side – the sense of a documentary photo. The pictures seem to document a performance (which, once again, links them to the art of the ‘70s), since the woman seems to be performing in/with the inflatable construction.
However, the title Dreamstructure also leads one’s thoughts in another direction; it is as if the woman, via the structure, finds herself in another world or reality, a sort of parallel reality that belongs to the world of dreams or ideas. The inflatable construction forms a huge organizational structure, a surrealist art prosthesis, that like a Louise Bourgeois’ creation engulfs the space and almost overwhelms the woman in costume, which together with the structure’s partial transparence underscores the figure’s dream-like connotations. The structure may also be seen as an image of the dream itself, which grows out of the body. Finally, there is the fact that, in some of the pictures, the woman looks as if she could be asleep in the structure. Here, it functions as a bed of sorts and forms, in the same way a bed does, the physical framework for the unfolding of dreams during sleep.
IN A SCANDINAVIAN CONTEXT
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is linked primarily to a Central European context but has a number of points in common with several Nordic artists as well. The clearest is a kinship with Swedish artist Annika von Hausswolff. Her photographs of women with large chewing gum bubbles in front of their faces and especially her large-format photograph Still Life – John & Jane Doe in the Arena from 1995, in which we see a dressed man and naked woman lying covered as if they were corpses on a dilapidated tennis court, have some of the same substantive implications as Tschäpe’s series 100 Little Deaths and raise many of the same questions: What has happened, who has done it?, etc. A clear kinship can also be sensed with several Finnish video artists and photographers, both with respect to the themes that are dealt with and the way they are presented. For example, we could point to Elina Brotherus’ landscape photography in which she explores the painterly aspects of the photograph having to do with composition, space and color. Or we could point to Salla Tykkä’s video trilogy Cave, which presents in a symbolic and dream-like universe fragments of a larger story, while exploring filmic, narrative strategies for storytelling.
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is self-reflexive in the sense that her artistic studies are just as much about the medium and the thematic tradition of which her pictures are a part as they are about particular thematic content. Therefore, Tschäpe’s pictures do not offer conclusions or ultimate answers. They are, rather, contributions to a visual dialogue in which the viewer is interlocutor.
© Janaina Tschäpe
Euni 2, Dreamstructure, 2002
C-print Photography
160 cm x 166 cm
Ed. 5 + 2 ap
DREAM IMAGES - on Janaina Tschäpe’s photography
Kristine Kern, December 2005
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
Sigmund Freud
German-born visual artist Janaina Tschäpe works in the median between the poetic and the bizarre. She creates visually fascinating images, at once captivating and uncanny – the latter in the sense best conveyed by the German word unheimlich. Tschäpe works with photography, drawing, film and installation. For her, it is not so much the medium itself as what it can be used for that is important. It is more about what she wants to say with a particular work and, here, the form or means of expression she decides to utilize is often a part of the work’s meaning, as is the case in a number of drawings in which reflections upon the medium and the process are integrated into the finished work.
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is very filmic, virtually regardless of the medium in which she expresses herself and, even though there are also clear references to performance and body art, there often seem to be cinematic considerations at play. Tschäpe also works with an understated narration in a number of works – traces of a story that is never developed but simply exists as a conception of the picture’s before and after: Only the contours of a story are hinted at, as we are seemingly introduced to a fragment of a larger tale.
FILMIC PHOTOGRAPHY
Janaina Tschäpe is showing three photographic series at Bo Bjerggaard: Dreamstructure, Botanica and 100 Little Deaths; and it is especially in the last-named series that Tschäpe works with filmic staging and narrative traces. On the whole, the series, which consists of nine pictures from 1998 – 99, presents the same motif in different stagings or scenarios. A young woman (the artist herself) is seen lying on her stomach in otherwise deserted surroundings. Has there been an accident, has she fallen, perhaps? Or has there been a violent attack? We do not know, and the pictures supply no answer. The scenario seems to be the culmination of a dramatic event. We perceive some prior suspense; but, since we do not know the antecedent history, the viewer is left with an open ending in the sense that it is up to the individual to imagine the sequence of events that has led to the occurrence, i.e., the woman’s “fall.” Furthermore, since the photographs are quite filmically staged in their composition, lighting, etc., we immediately think in terms of a narrative, filmic context. The pictures could be – and are presumably consciously staged as – stills from a feature film. At any rate, the use of filmic codes has the effect that we involuntarily read the motifs within a cinematic framework.
Like, for example, American artist Cindy Sherman’s “calendar girl” pictures from the early 1980s, women in Tschäpe’s pictures are presented as victims. Yet, whereas, in Sherman, it seems clear that the women have been subjected to violence, the situation is a little more uncertain in Tschäpe. There is no social agenda or gender politics here, since the uncertainty surrounding the event presented seems to be the very theme of the pictures. Instead of giving an answer, Tschäpe’s photographs raise more questions.
LES FLEURS DU MAL
The flower motif has a long tradition in the history of art, particularly in the form of the still life, and Janaina Tschäpe continues this tradition with her Botanica series from 2005 – the most recent of the three photo series. It is natural, therefore, to view the photographs as sort of “memento mori” motifs, emphasized by the duality of the uncanny and the beautiful that characterizes the pictures and by the almost inscrutable darkness lurking in the background of each. Like some sort of Baudelarian flowers of evil, the plants emerge from the darkness, oddly iridescent in their exoticism. The pictures present an unfamiliar, artificial nature, which is why they seem “alien” – perhaps, a bit frightening. In contrast to, for example, the work of the Swiss artistic duo Fischli & Weiss, Untitled (Flowers) from 1997 - 98, in which plants are rather investigated through the banality of their cyclical growth, Tschäpe focuses on the strangeness of flowers, and their symbolic function becomes completely different. In Tschäpe, the flower is a curiosity, something decadent and artificial in nature, which represents what is different, what is not every day, the unheimliche.
PERFORMATIVE BODY PICTURES
The last of the three series, Dreamstructure from 2002, is linked directly to the feminist body and performance art of the 1970s in which the female body was used as a tool for (gender) political statements but presents, at the same time, an updated, slightly self-ironic perspective on the problems surrounding female self-representation and the representation of women generally. In Janaina Tschäpe’s photographs, we see a young woman with long, dark hair, almost hidden in a huge inflatable structure of white material. It looks like something between a dress and a tent or, perhaps, a costume of some sort. The photographs are stills from a video and, when we look at them, we get – without doubt, quite consciously from the artist’s side – the sense of a documentary photo. The pictures seem to document a performance (which, once again, links them to the art of the ‘70s), since the woman seems to be performing in/with the inflatable construction.
However, the title Dreamstructure also leads one’s thoughts in another direction; it is as if the woman, via the structure, finds herself in another world or reality, a sort of parallel reality that belongs to the world of dreams or ideas. The inflatable construction forms a huge organizational structure, a surrealist art prosthesis, that like a Louise Bourgeois’ creation engulfs the space and almost overwhelms the woman in costume, which together with the structure’s partial transparence underscores the figure’s dream-like connotations. The structure may also be seen as an image of the dream itself, which grows out of the body. Finally, there is the fact that, in some of the pictures, the woman looks as if she could be asleep in the structure. Here, it functions as a bed of sorts and forms, in the same way a bed does, the physical framework for the unfolding of dreams during sleep.
IN A SCANDINAVIAN CONTEXT
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is linked primarily to a Central European context but has a number of points in common with several Nordic artists as well. The clearest is a kinship with Swedish artist Annika von Hausswolff. Her photographs of women with large chewing gum bubbles in front of their faces and especially her large-format photograph Still Life – John & Jane Doe in the Arena from 1995, in which we see a dressed man and naked woman lying covered as if they were corpses on a dilapidated tennis court, have some of the same substantive implications as Tschäpe’s series 100 Little Deaths and raise many of the same questions: What has happened, who has done it?, etc. A clear kinship can also be sensed with several Finnish video artists and photographers, both with respect to the themes that are dealt with and the way they are presented. For example, we could point to Elina Brotherus’ landscape photography in which she explores the painterly aspects of the photograph having to do with composition, space and color. Or we could point to Salla Tykkä’s video trilogy Cave, which presents in a symbolic and dream-like universe fragments of a larger story, while exploring filmic, narrative strategies for storytelling.
Janaina Tschäpe’s work is self-reflexive in the sense that her artistic studies are just as much about the medium and the thematic tradition of which her pictures are a part as they are about particular thematic content. Therefore, Tschäpe’s pictures do not offer conclusions or ultimate answers. They are, rather, contributions to a visual dialogue in which the viewer is interlocutor.
© Janaina Tschäpe
Euni 2, Dreamstructure, 2002
C-print Photography
160 cm x 166 cm
Ed. 5 + 2 ap