Doreen Mende on Artmap.com

SOMETIMES IT IS BETTER TO HIDE A GOOD THOUGHT BETWEEN IMAGES AND SOUNDS OF SPACE

This publication contains cut-outs of images, stolen words from a book and snippets of a film script. It hosts snatches from reality purloined from films, books, dialogues, and thoughts. They have been essential during certain times of thinking here and elsewhere. Stitched together, they re-connect for another temporal duration of the real, interrupted by a book fold, a crevice, a blind spot, and a stammering. Making these pages public here marks a stoppage, a pause in a process of thinking – on the TV-series The Wire, on Jean Genet, the GDR, exhibits and exhibiting, the manifestation of ideas and display.

This act of exposure suggests a blurring of Western imperatives on notions of past and future, constituting a singular exhibition-time when the reader holds the book between her hands as a folded time. It neither shows an outside nor inside. It unfolds a texture implicating us in a state of not quite knowing what is going on here. However, the time-shared entanglement might enable us to enter a form of production in which an inhibition turns into an emancipatory mode for exhibition. It is an approach to making something public aiming to re-think the constitution of display without representing a time or a place, but activating the real between you and I. This form of exposure is rather a condition of reflection that locates the political in the interstice between images, words and sounds.

“Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and itʼs in the desert we must go and look for them.” Jean Genet

English Subtitles: The Wire, Season 1, Episode 6 ‚The Wireʼ, Directed by: Ed Bianchi, Writing credits: David Simon (creator), David Simon (teleplay), David Simon (story) & Ed Burns (story) (as Edward Burns), 2002.

Film Still: The Wire, Season 2, Episode 7 ‚Backwashʼ, Directed by: Thomas J. Wright, Writing credits: David Simon (creator), Rafael Álvarez (teleplay), David Simon (story) &, Rafael Álvarez (story), 2003.

Text: Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, translated from French by Barbara Bray, with an introduction by Ahdaf Soueif, pages: table of contents and 172–173, 2003 (first published in French in 1986).

Photograph: World Festival of Youth and Students 1973, tribune of honor with Angela Davis and Yasser Arafat. Image © Reinhard Mende, Zürchau 2011.

Doreen Mende, 2011. Thanks to Goethe Institute Ramallah and Arab Image Foundation, Beirut

"Doreen Mende carries out a curatorial research on the conditions of image production in connection with the solidarity project of socialist movements. The book features press picture material from the curator's father, as well as pages from found elements. Admittedly the material might be randomly selected, but its montage in a print connects the pieces without explaining their explicit connections - thus allowing the reader to enter a space between past and present, in a poetical way." www.boabooks.com

Doreen Mende | ISBN 978-2-940409-46-4
Brochure | 18 pages | 155 x 210 mm.
Photocopies, First Edition | CHF 14 / € 10 / $ 14

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