Jana Müller
Traces of Truth
06 Apr - 25 May 2019
JANA MÜLLER
Traces of Truth
6 April – 25 May 2019
There always has been a considerable interest in real crime scenes and evidence objects of all kinds. In Traces of Truth Berlin based photographer Jana Müller follows this curiosity in pictures, collages and installations. She searches for clues and sets imaginative tracks.
In the evidence rooms of the republic – often trivial places such as garages and empty shops – the artist has documented countless pieces of evidence. As banal as the individual objects often are, the shine of evil is not yet off. In a quite manipulative game with the associations of the viewer, new unpredictable stories develop. Looking at the province, the hype of media exploitation of scientific police work that has been observed for years – in particular forensic investigations in the form of fictional and pseudo-documentary police series – has been taken up and driven on.
Ostensibly, Traces of Truth deals with the truth, more precisely with the relation of reality to fiction and the role of the object and the documentary image in this constellation. The question is whether parallels between artists and criminals can be drawn in so far as both violate norms and taboos with „criminal“ energy? For the first time in decades Müller picks up a thread that Erich Wulffen began researching in his influental essays on criminal psychology in the 1920s. The key questions then and today are: What is the relationship between crime and art? To what extent are criminal and artistic border crossings comparable? Is there possibly a comparable causa, a parallel drive for both?
Traces of Truth
6 April – 25 May 2019
There always has been a considerable interest in real crime scenes and evidence objects of all kinds. In Traces of Truth Berlin based photographer Jana Müller follows this curiosity in pictures, collages and installations. She searches for clues and sets imaginative tracks.
In the evidence rooms of the republic – often trivial places such as garages and empty shops – the artist has documented countless pieces of evidence. As banal as the individual objects often are, the shine of evil is not yet off. In a quite manipulative game with the associations of the viewer, new unpredictable stories develop. Looking at the province, the hype of media exploitation of scientific police work that has been observed for years – in particular forensic investigations in the form of fictional and pseudo-documentary police series – has been taken up and driven on.
Ostensibly, Traces of Truth deals with the truth, more precisely with the relation of reality to fiction and the role of the object and the documentary image in this constellation. The question is whether parallels between artists and criminals can be drawn in so far as both violate norms and taboos with „criminal“ energy? For the first time in decades Müller picks up a thread that Erich Wulffen began researching in his influental essays on criminal psychology in the 1920s. The key questions then and today are: What is the relationship between crime and art? To what extent are criminal and artistic border crossings comparable? Is there possibly a comparable causa, a parallel drive for both?