Ulrike Feser

„Outdoor Guy“


preview Friday, December 5, 2003, 7 - 9 pm
exhibition December 6, 2003 - January 31, 2004


Galerie Kamm is pleased to present Ulrike Feser with her second solo exhibition in the gallery. With the photo series “Meine Meinung” (“My Opinion”) and the wall-collage “Outdoor Guy” the artist investigates the ways in which images are charged with meaning through social rituals and political events which are spread by the media, and influence subjective perception.

“Two photos from the series “Outdoor Guy” show two girls sitting on the wooden saddle of a camel. They seem to be enjoying themselves. One is wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the band “Slipknot”; the other has her back turned to the viewer with the hood of her black sweatshirt up. The barren ground behind resembles a desert landscape.

The scene is disturbing because the visual elements which come together here are known from other contexts: “Slipknot” was the favourite band of the Erfurt amok-runner Robert Steinhäuser – for an alarmist press the perfect example of a particular type of dangerous youth, whereas the camel is part of the iconography of Arabic culture.

This moment of confusion and the simultaneous compulsion to make chains of associations based on the knowledge of the media participator are developed in the other images of the series. In one of the artist’s photos the rapper Eminem stares threateningly from a poster on the wall of a child’s bedroom; in a newspaper photo, investigators in protective clothing can be seen at the crash-site of the controversial politician Möllemann; in another we see a horse which has strayed onto a motorway. Curiosities and transferrals of threatening scenarios orchestrated by the media add up to a diffuse image of the world in a state of emergency.

In the way that she combines her own production with found material from the media, Ulrike Feser comments critically on her method as an artist and free-lance photographer. In no way does she want to denounce the “bad” media in order to posit the purity of her artistic position.

That such a position turns out to be illusionary, she demonstrates with the photos of the second series, to which she has given the title “Meine Meinung”. The pictures seem to offer a contrasting program to the first series: a cave transformed into a concert hall, a desert landscape, the undergrowth of a wood, the interior of a church invite the viewer to contemplation. But even here there is a drift of images; inevitably cross references intrude on the information flow and inner-reflection seems to be merely a reflex to the data streams, for which the observing subject serves as a through station.” Robert Pitterle

Please contact the gallery for further informations.