Ricarda Roggan
01 May - 20 Jun 2015
Apokryphen
In her photographic work, Ricarda Roggan deals with encountered objects, abandoned places, rooms and marks which people there left behind.
In her new series Apokryphen Ricarda Roggan puts the focus on objects and archived legacy of famous personalities, philosophers, writers and composers. The selected objects, which originate from small archives and biographical museums, are laid out just as if they were waiting to be collected and borne away. Things she detected are for instance a rastrum, which was used by Johann Sebastian Bach to draw the staves, a paper knife by Wilhelm Raabe or a pencil by Kurt Tucholsky.
Where do they come from, what happened to them, which period do they belong to and how do they appear to us now? Ricarda Roggan tries to explain those questions with the help of the arrangements of her items, the emphasis of everyday objects and her classical photographic perspective. What does the observation of Kurt Tucholsky's pencil teach us? The presentation of such things is obviously more likely to have an auratic, rather than a documentary or informative character. The remains escape out of the anonymity of the everyday objects and become representatives.
„The things have become „apocryphal" because they no longer belong the work of their owners, but instead carve out a shadowy existence for themselves, as it were, beside the written sentences, rhymes and works. The things have become incidental, „sciagraphical", as the peripheral areas of aesthetics were described in the 18th century in keeping with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten – not really belonging to any aesthetic, any canon. „Sciagraphy" was of course the first designation which the English inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, chose for his process of reproducible photographs, shadow writing, evoking the myth of the origin of painting.
By carefully arranging them, Ricarda Roggan is able for a moment to liberate the things from the destiny of being linked to their own history, so as to bring them both to light for us, the history and the redemption. Ricarda Roggan's things bring their beginning and their end together, and back to the beginning. Things in time, things in space."(1)
The motives in her meticulously staged pictorial worlds are freed from contextual attributions and unfold a quiet magic in the photographic space, directing the viewer's glance to the idiosyncrasies of the things. Roggan creates pictorial spaces full of echoes and resonances that stimulate personal memories and associations, unfurling the history of the things without disclosing them.
Ricarda Roggan (born in 1972 in Dresden) is one of the most important German photographers of her generation. She studied photography at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in the class of Prof. Timm Rautert. After her certification as a master student, Ricarda Roggan attended the Royal College of Art in London and graduated with a Master of Arts. Today she lives and works in Leipzig.
(1) with an extract of the text: The Destiny of Things. Die Apokryphen von Ricarda Roggan, Hubertus von Amelunxen
In her photographic work, Ricarda Roggan deals with encountered objects, abandoned places, rooms and marks which people there left behind.
In her new series Apokryphen Ricarda Roggan puts the focus on objects and archived legacy of famous personalities, philosophers, writers and composers. The selected objects, which originate from small archives and biographical museums, are laid out just as if they were waiting to be collected and borne away. Things she detected are for instance a rastrum, which was used by Johann Sebastian Bach to draw the staves, a paper knife by Wilhelm Raabe or a pencil by Kurt Tucholsky.
Where do they come from, what happened to them, which period do they belong to and how do they appear to us now? Ricarda Roggan tries to explain those questions with the help of the arrangements of her items, the emphasis of everyday objects and her classical photographic perspective. What does the observation of Kurt Tucholsky's pencil teach us? The presentation of such things is obviously more likely to have an auratic, rather than a documentary or informative character. The remains escape out of the anonymity of the everyday objects and become representatives.
„The things have become „apocryphal" because they no longer belong the work of their owners, but instead carve out a shadowy existence for themselves, as it were, beside the written sentences, rhymes and works. The things have become incidental, „sciagraphical", as the peripheral areas of aesthetics were described in the 18th century in keeping with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten – not really belonging to any aesthetic, any canon. „Sciagraphy" was of course the first designation which the English inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, chose for his process of reproducible photographs, shadow writing, evoking the myth of the origin of painting.
By carefully arranging them, Ricarda Roggan is able for a moment to liberate the things from the destiny of being linked to their own history, so as to bring them both to light for us, the history and the redemption. Ricarda Roggan's things bring their beginning and their end together, and back to the beginning. Things in time, things in space."(1)
The motives in her meticulously staged pictorial worlds are freed from contextual attributions and unfold a quiet magic in the photographic space, directing the viewer's glance to the idiosyncrasies of the things. Roggan creates pictorial spaces full of echoes and resonances that stimulate personal memories and associations, unfurling the history of the things without disclosing them.
Ricarda Roggan (born in 1972 in Dresden) is one of the most important German photographers of her generation. She studied photography at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in the class of Prof. Timm Rautert. After her certification as a master student, Ricarda Roggan attended the Royal College of Art in London and graduated with a Master of Arts. Today she lives and works in Leipzig.
(1) with an extract of the text: The Destiny of Things. Die Apokryphen von Ricarda Roggan, Hubertus von Amelunxen