(EN) JORINDE VOIGT / ‘REWRITE - CONSTELLATION OF ONE’ GALERIE FAHNEMANN / FAHNEMANN PROJECTS, BERLIN / MARCH 2008
Jorinde Voigt / ‘ReWrite - Constellation of One’Galerie Fahnemann / Fahnemann Projects, Berlin / March 2008
Fahnemann Projects is proud to present ‘ReWrite Constellation of One’, the second solo showing of the work of artist Jorinde Voigt.
For her debut exhibition, in 2007, at Fahnemann Projects, Voigt presented ‘Perm Millennial’, a series of drawn works that examined the idea of an uncertain time ‘before history’. Through these drawn notations, the artist set about identifying the presence of certain elements before going on to systemise them using idiosyncratic mechanisms such as repeating rhythmic structures of pop songs, rises in temperature or eagles passing overhead. This unique way of ‘thinking through drawing’ not only guides us in examining the division between the non-written (ambiguous) and the written (explicit), but also provides a highly subjective depiction of systems where parameters are fixed first by the artist, with structures emerging from within them.
If Jorinde Voigt’s expansive Perm triptychs brought us out of ambiguity and into the explicit with their exhaustive notation, then the works in ‘ReWrite...’ seek to challenge or literally re-write this familiarity. In drawings such as ‘ReWrite I, II, III, IV...’ Voigt invites us to reconsider our recognised positions to our surrounding geography (both physical and metaphysical) by portraying a rotating force of raw sound in within which a fixed point attempts to find its bearing in relation to standard compass settings. Through this process, Voigt employs a sort of ‘shift’, which, via the compass needle’s deviation over each parameter, scans all possible variations, in an endless rotation, disallowing any connection or comfort in regularity or pattern. In effect – irregularity becomes pattern. This ‘shift’ is something we have seen before in Voigt’s drawings, with her propositions of musical phrases repeating themselves along staggered timelines, and in her earlier works, where periods of time are laid out like music staves before being interrupted with plane sounds, café chatter, thunder and explosions.
This ‘shift’ device that alienates us from the familiar, could may remind us of Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” in which Brecht proposed that onlookers reality is a constructed one, containing the potential to be both unstable and variable. Brecht achieved this through devices that included highly unreal lighting conditions, large placards held up to the audience and tenses of play scripts changed from present to past and back again. In fact Voigt’s seemingly chaotic combination of elements of speeding cars and changing temperature rates that make up her measuring axes could well be seen in parallel to Brecht’s artificial contrivances. Even Brecht’s fictional narrations of historical events, remind us of Voigt’s re-readings of natural occurrences, that should be perceived, not at face value, but as ‘propositons’ that enable us to remove ourselves into the objective realm.
In Voigt’s earlier works, the ‘shift’ was purely lineal, but as later works developed, arriving at ‘ReWrite...’, the lineal has given way to motifs of unfurling rotations. These allude to elements of natural growth, progression, escape, - but also a balletic joy of motion, perhaps even, of dance.
The artist has said of the ‘ReWrite...’ works, that through the process of setting up these displacements in time and space, she has engaged a world that seemed far, far away and brought it closer to her. This has taken place against a continual ‘present-time’, represented in these notations by constant, looping tones of sound and flowing arrow fields. Like the eagles in her drawings, which fly high above in the heavens, Voigt has retracted herself from the face of culture, objectifying it into a state of sense.
Andrew Cannon