Kathi Hofer
17 Jan - 08 Mar 2014
KATHI HOFER
New Year's Resolutions
17 January - 8 March 2014
In the long run, we are all dead
With her exhibition „New Year’s Resolutions“, on display at Gabriele Senn Galerie, Kathi Hofer picks up on the seasonal atmosphere that is full of increased expectations for the future. She combines subjective projections with collective rites that are immanent of the production of desires and thereby designs a setting in which she connects real objects – gift wrapping paper, jars, objects used for display and decoration – with photographic reproductions thereof. In this sense, she sets in motion a loop of signs, recalling the complex thoughts of Walter Benjamin that “the reproduced work of art is increasingly becoming the reproduction of a work of art intended for reproducibility”. With this intricate thesis, taken from his famous and frequently quoted essay, Benjamin concludes that for the first time the work of art is liberating itself from its parasitic existence on rites due to technical reproducibility. Reflecting on the reproduction status of photography, Kathi Hofer is re-introducing exactly this rite that Modernism struggled to dispose of in order to describe a form of social participation whilst also referring to its perils. The magic practices of desires are, after all, also regulative invocations of the inner self, resolutions are only speculations whose distance from reality often seduces us to indulge in creative forms of procrastination, delay or laissez-faire.
What becomes manifest in the gift as an object is a place of exchange for social and spontaneous relations, for in the ritual of making a gift, which in the act of wrapping embodies the remains of a creative act, relations take shape. Kathi Hofer dedicates particular attention to this transfer from rite to form by composing a very precise still life, arranging wrapped gifts, coffee mugs and displays of the working process such as paper or pencil cases and combining them with her photographs. Phrases and slogans taken from John Maynard Keynes’ macroeconomic writings are printed onto the empty mugs. Keynes, who in times of the Great Depression refused to give long-term calculations and economic forecasts, was convinced that we cannot make definite statements about the future, because – as he wrote in 1937 – “we simply do not know”. The Keynesian abstractness of expectations for the future in relation to the current state of affairs is reflected in Kathi Hofer’s pictures and assemblages, which only reveal their concrete meaning in their specific constellation of desire, exchange and production of desires.
Eva Maria Stadler and Kathi Hofer
New Year's Resolutions
17 January - 8 March 2014
In the long run, we are all dead
With her exhibition „New Year’s Resolutions“, on display at Gabriele Senn Galerie, Kathi Hofer picks up on the seasonal atmosphere that is full of increased expectations for the future. She combines subjective projections with collective rites that are immanent of the production of desires and thereby designs a setting in which she connects real objects – gift wrapping paper, jars, objects used for display and decoration – with photographic reproductions thereof. In this sense, she sets in motion a loop of signs, recalling the complex thoughts of Walter Benjamin that “the reproduced work of art is increasingly becoming the reproduction of a work of art intended for reproducibility”. With this intricate thesis, taken from his famous and frequently quoted essay, Benjamin concludes that for the first time the work of art is liberating itself from its parasitic existence on rites due to technical reproducibility. Reflecting on the reproduction status of photography, Kathi Hofer is re-introducing exactly this rite that Modernism struggled to dispose of in order to describe a form of social participation whilst also referring to its perils. The magic practices of desires are, after all, also regulative invocations of the inner self, resolutions are only speculations whose distance from reality often seduces us to indulge in creative forms of procrastination, delay or laissez-faire.
What becomes manifest in the gift as an object is a place of exchange for social and spontaneous relations, for in the ritual of making a gift, which in the act of wrapping embodies the remains of a creative act, relations take shape. Kathi Hofer dedicates particular attention to this transfer from rite to form by composing a very precise still life, arranging wrapped gifts, coffee mugs and displays of the working process such as paper or pencil cases and combining them with her photographs. Phrases and slogans taken from John Maynard Keynes’ macroeconomic writings are printed onto the empty mugs. Keynes, who in times of the Great Depression refused to give long-term calculations and economic forecasts, was convinced that we cannot make definite statements about the future, because – as he wrote in 1937 – “we simply do not know”. The Keynesian abstractness of expectations for the future in relation to the current state of affairs is reflected in Kathi Hofer’s pictures and assemblages, which only reveal their concrete meaning in their specific constellation of desire, exchange and production of desires.
Eva Maria Stadler and Kathi Hofer