Valerie Stahl von Stromberg
04 May - 15 Jun 2013
© Valerie Stahl von Stromberg
„Rumania Landscape (Agriculture)“, 2013
Inkjet on Hahnemühle, welded steel frame
60 x 80 cm, Ed. 1/5 + 1 AP
Installation view "The Blind Cook (Chinese Keys & Thai Leaves)", Galerie Sandra Bürgel, Berlin 2013
„Rumania Landscape (Agriculture)“, 2013
Inkjet on Hahnemühle, welded steel frame
60 x 80 cm, Ed. 1/5 + 1 AP
Installation view "The Blind Cook (Chinese Keys & Thai Leaves)", Galerie Sandra Bürgel, Berlin 2013
VALERIE STAHL VON STROMBERG
The Blind Cook (Chinese Keys & Thai Leaves)
4 May – 15 June 2013
Speculations [1] On Cultures, Realities, Nature And Art.
A large format work of the exhibition is “International Property Art Board”. It’s a billboard pasted with collected pages of the South China Morning Post, dating from March to April 2013. The daily newspaper SCMP is published in English in Hong Kong. It was founded in the British Crown Colony in 1903, at the time of the Chinese Empire and remains largely independent despite of its relations to Beijing. The formation consists of text and image, visualized messages, photos and advertising and informs about the current figuration of Southeast Asia. Predominant issues are property, territorial claims, political leadership, luxury goods and watches.
The protection of private property got enshrined in the Chinese constitution in 2004, with the exception of land and leasehold rights. The handling of goods in the Capitalism implemented by the Communist Party of China conjoins with the Three Teachings (三 教, sānjiào: Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism), the concept of yin-yang (陰陽 / 阴阳 yīn yáng) and Mao's Cultural Revolution. It is understood in a long-term and rhythmically opposing relation. [2]
Cultura (Latin) means cultivation as in ‘processing’, ‘care’, or in ‘agriculture’.
Technology, Science, Logic and Economy are cultural achievements.
To cook, to serve, to present, to sell.
The Blind Cook is a substitute, for the farmer, the wife, the architect, the scientist, the photographer, the artist.
“National Geographic Photography (Naxi Woman), 2012” is a portrait of an old landowner dressed in her azure costume in Shuhe Town, Lijiang, at the foot of the holy Jade-Dragon Snow Mountain (south-east of Himalayas, Yunnan Province). Her face and her gaze that has not yet entirely gone blind are shaped by religion and nature, and a scepticism we have lost.
Already in earlier works Valerie Stahl von Stromberg has referred approvingly to the National Geographic and she has cited the genre of travel documentation. The photography has been granted a dramaturgic and formal centre in the exhibition. Its colour intensity, the benevolence / presence, and the silent distance of the photographic view - that is echoed here by the photo subject - are characteristic.Assumptions. The tables could be for dinner or sales counters.
On the right table objects are presented on silver trays.
The tray provides a formal distance between two persons; it evokes associations with a hotel, a society, transition and promise.
The dreamed of objects “Camera Hand (Black), 2009”, “International Property Keys (To Move Ahead Together & Double Mountain), 2013,” and “Compass Ear (urban), 2011” are based on 3-dimensional images transferred with CNC - via electronically steered movement of machinery - and with silk screen printing into material. They resemble prototypes also because they originate from long processes of discussion, language, logic and suggestion and were made by the help of friends and experts in Shanghai.
Although the objects are enlarged images, they maintain a resonance of an own body part.
“Camera Hand” is the fusion of a 3D scan of the artist’s hand with an analogue camera, the Contax Aria of Carl Zeiss from 1998. “Compass Ear” exists in three camouflage versions: desert, jungle / forest and concrete / urban. Two functions coalesce: the sense for gravity, direction and acceleration from our ear, and the four directions from the magnetic forces of a compass.
“Three branches of physics were particularly well developed in ancient and medieval China: optics, acoustics and magnetism. This was in striking contrast with the West, where mechanics and dynamics were relatively advanced but magnetic phenomena almost unknown.
China and Europe differed most profoundly perhaps in the great debate about continuity and discontinuity, just as Chinese Mathematics was always algebraic rather than geometrical, so Chinese physics was faithful to a prototypic wave theory. There is no doubt that the Buddhist philosophers were always bringing in knowledge of the Vaseshika theories about atoms, bout nobody in China was willing to listen. The Chinese stuck to the ideas of universal motion in a continuous medium, action at a distance, and the wavelike motions of the Yin and Yang.” [3]
Several photographs of the exhibition retain a residue of idealisation. The idealisation whether individual or collective is as much caught in reflections as remembered lyrically, which is to say left intact:
"Riva, 2013," the theatrical advertisement of a real estate fund at a bus stop in Hong Kong, a modernist house in Bucharest or the haze shrouded Victoria Harbour of Hong Kong in the moment of time when the clouds rip up.
“Host in Bemphu, Mountains Bhutan, 2013” shows the preparation of a dish of vegetables and barley on hot stone, in an imprint between beauty and nature far from electricity, water and telecommunications. “Shanghai Songjiang Industrial Zone (Building 1/100), 2012” is the first of hundred pictures of a similar number of factory buildings in Zhejiang province. The architecture blends eclectic styles from colonial to post-modernist joyfully.
1 Speculation here is not meant as an assessment made into the future. Also it’s not a purely conceptual thinking opposed to a physical naturelike experience as assumed by empiricism. It had a fuller adoption in scholasticism and in the philosophy of Hegel who rehabilitated the term: „Spekulativ denken heißt ein Wirkliches auflösen und dieses in sich so entgegensetzen, dass die Unterschiede nach Denkbestimmungen entgegengesetzt sind und der Gegenstand als Einheit beider aufgefasst wird.“ (Speculative reason dissolves a real and opposes it in itself so that the differences are opposed by their thought forms and the subject matter is seen as a unity of them two.) G.W.F. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I, Bd. 16/20, stw, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 30.)
2 An extensive insight into Chinese thinking gives: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: Language and Logic in Traditional China, Vol. 7 Part 1, 1998 (ed. by Ch. Harbsmeier)On the white hotel tablecloth of the left table are three dried Alocasia leaves that were transported in a suitcase between soaked newspapers from Hong Kong to Berlin. Between them and the newspaper board floats “Boy, Bangtao Beach, Pukhet, Thailand”, the simple, yet tourist portrait of a young man who has just picked 10 coconuts from a 12 meter tall palm tree, because this is his learned profession.
3 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: Language and Logic in Traditional China, Vol. 7 Part 1, 1998 (ed. by Ch. Harbsmeier)
The Blind Cook (Chinese Keys & Thai Leaves)
4 May – 15 June 2013
Speculations [1] On Cultures, Realities, Nature And Art.
A large format work of the exhibition is “International Property Art Board”. It’s a billboard pasted with collected pages of the South China Morning Post, dating from March to April 2013. The daily newspaper SCMP is published in English in Hong Kong. It was founded in the British Crown Colony in 1903, at the time of the Chinese Empire and remains largely independent despite of its relations to Beijing. The formation consists of text and image, visualized messages, photos and advertising and informs about the current figuration of Southeast Asia. Predominant issues are property, territorial claims, political leadership, luxury goods and watches.
The protection of private property got enshrined in the Chinese constitution in 2004, with the exception of land and leasehold rights. The handling of goods in the Capitalism implemented by the Communist Party of China conjoins with the Three Teachings (三 教, sānjiào: Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism), the concept of yin-yang (陰陽 / 阴阳 yīn yáng) and Mao's Cultural Revolution. It is understood in a long-term and rhythmically opposing relation. [2]
Cultura (Latin) means cultivation as in ‘processing’, ‘care’, or in ‘agriculture’.
Technology, Science, Logic and Economy are cultural achievements.
To cook, to serve, to present, to sell.
The Blind Cook is a substitute, for the farmer, the wife, the architect, the scientist, the photographer, the artist.
“National Geographic Photography (Naxi Woman), 2012” is a portrait of an old landowner dressed in her azure costume in Shuhe Town, Lijiang, at the foot of the holy Jade-Dragon Snow Mountain (south-east of Himalayas, Yunnan Province). Her face and her gaze that has not yet entirely gone blind are shaped by religion and nature, and a scepticism we have lost.
Already in earlier works Valerie Stahl von Stromberg has referred approvingly to the National Geographic and she has cited the genre of travel documentation. The photography has been granted a dramaturgic and formal centre in the exhibition. Its colour intensity, the benevolence / presence, and the silent distance of the photographic view - that is echoed here by the photo subject - are characteristic.Assumptions. The tables could be for dinner or sales counters.
On the right table objects are presented on silver trays.
The tray provides a formal distance between two persons; it evokes associations with a hotel, a society, transition and promise.
The dreamed of objects “Camera Hand (Black), 2009”, “International Property Keys (To Move Ahead Together & Double Mountain), 2013,” and “Compass Ear (urban), 2011” are based on 3-dimensional images transferred with CNC - via electronically steered movement of machinery - and with silk screen printing into material. They resemble prototypes also because they originate from long processes of discussion, language, logic and suggestion and were made by the help of friends and experts in Shanghai.
Although the objects are enlarged images, they maintain a resonance of an own body part.
“Camera Hand” is the fusion of a 3D scan of the artist’s hand with an analogue camera, the Contax Aria of Carl Zeiss from 1998. “Compass Ear” exists in three camouflage versions: desert, jungle / forest and concrete / urban. Two functions coalesce: the sense for gravity, direction and acceleration from our ear, and the four directions from the magnetic forces of a compass.
“Three branches of physics were particularly well developed in ancient and medieval China: optics, acoustics and magnetism. This was in striking contrast with the West, where mechanics and dynamics were relatively advanced but magnetic phenomena almost unknown.
China and Europe differed most profoundly perhaps in the great debate about continuity and discontinuity, just as Chinese Mathematics was always algebraic rather than geometrical, so Chinese physics was faithful to a prototypic wave theory. There is no doubt that the Buddhist philosophers were always bringing in knowledge of the Vaseshika theories about atoms, bout nobody in China was willing to listen. The Chinese stuck to the ideas of universal motion in a continuous medium, action at a distance, and the wavelike motions of the Yin and Yang.” [3]
Several photographs of the exhibition retain a residue of idealisation. The idealisation whether individual or collective is as much caught in reflections as remembered lyrically, which is to say left intact:
"Riva, 2013," the theatrical advertisement of a real estate fund at a bus stop in Hong Kong, a modernist house in Bucharest or the haze shrouded Victoria Harbour of Hong Kong in the moment of time when the clouds rip up.
“Host in Bemphu, Mountains Bhutan, 2013” shows the preparation of a dish of vegetables and barley on hot stone, in an imprint between beauty and nature far from electricity, water and telecommunications. “Shanghai Songjiang Industrial Zone (Building 1/100), 2012” is the first of hundred pictures of a similar number of factory buildings in Zhejiang province. The architecture blends eclectic styles from colonial to post-modernist joyfully.
1 Speculation here is not meant as an assessment made into the future. Also it’s not a purely conceptual thinking opposed to a physical naturelike experience as assumed by empiricism. It had a fuller adoption in scholasticism and in the philosophy of Hegel who rehabilitated the term: „Spekulativ denken heißt ein Wirkliches auflösen und dieses in sich so entgegensetzen, dass die Unterschiede nach Denkbestimmungen entgegengesetzt sind und der Gegenstand als Einheit beider aufgefasst wird.“ (Speculative reason dissolves a real and opposes it in itself so that the differences are opposed by their thought forms and the subject matter is seen as a unity of them two.) G.W.F. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I, Bd. 16/20, stw, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 30.)
2 An extensive insight into Chinese thinking gives: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: Language and Logic in Traditional China, Vol. 7 Part 1, 1998 (ed. by Ch. Harbsmeier)On the white hotel tablecloth of the left table are three dried Alocasia leaves that were transported in a suitcase between soaked newspapers from Hong Kong to Berlin. Between them and the newspaper board floats “Boy, Bangtao Beach, Pukhet, Thailand”, the simple, yet tourist portrait of a young man who has just picked 10 coconuts from a 12 meter tall palm tree, because this is his learned profession.
3 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: Language and Logic in Traditional China, Vol. 7 Part 1, 1998 (ed. by Ch. Harbsmeier)