Galerie b2

Caroline Hake CANDY / Kerstin Flake AUF DEM BODEN
Photography

Although coming from contrary directions, the new photo works by Caroline Hake and Kerstin Flake reveal the artists’ interest in generating seemingly unreal visual worlds. Hake documents and decontextualizes the prefabricated settings, spaces and surfaces of the leisure and entertainment industries; whilst Flake employs photography to the ends of constructing absurd, idiosyncratic imageries.

In her new series titled CANDY, Caroline Hake sharpens the principle of photographic abstraction to a point by photographing the reflective high-end surfaces of the most recent car models. At car fairs, spotlights up above are seen to reflect in the cars’ high-gloss colour surfaces, creating bizarre galaxies of swirling stellar configurations and billowing vapour trails. Arranged in a rectangular block, twenty-one large pictures resemble a collection of scientific snapshots depicting cosmic movements before an intangible void of colour, of exquisite nothingness. To describe this as a distanced view of the setting imposed by an automotive fair would be too straightforward. For the relationship between dream production and the individual’s self-delusion, between the necessity of motorized mobility and the perverse apotheosis of purported freedoms of choice and self-representation can barely be overcome through distance. The subliminal forces fuelling dependency and suggestiveness are many and complex, and the strategies of generating desire cunningly opaque: The analysis of abstraction – in terms of both form and content – remains as the only suitable expedient.

In Kerstin Flake’s pictures, stray objects buzz through abandoned houses. A breath of life has returned to the deserted abodes. In this chasm of time lacking spatio-temporal distance, life turns differently. Driven by the power of conjecture, the photographs delineate the possible. Objects assemble themselves in subtle rebellion against desolation, rearing up in front of the camera as absurd temporary sculptures – until the film is exposed and the picture is in the box. Recalling spirit photography of the early 20th century, Flake also seeks to render emotional states visible: The photographic mark is of a fierce duplicity – visual fragments and sculptural amassments of memory suddenly flare up, invading the present like spectres, at once ephemeral and static.

The exhibition HAKE & FLAKE brings together two photographic reflections of current social developments: The enticing realm of luxury mirrored by the surfaces of the status symbol of the car, and the terrain vague after the withdrawal of human life. Juxtaposing these two extremes forces the viewer to negotiate between ideas of construction and de(con)struction, documentary and fiction, retreat and conquest. The question as to our own reality remains, our perception’s susceptibilty to illusion and intimation, and the consequences that all this may incite.