Cooperation exhibition by IG BILDENDE KUNST and AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE lower austria
Artists: Ines Hochgerner (A), Benedek Regős (H)
Duration of the exhibtion: 28. September – 26. November 2021
Opening: 28. September 18 – 21 Uhr
The exhibition linked addresses the question concerning the relation between image (likeness) and reality. Images do not merely influence perception but at present virtually seem to take precedence over the act of seeing and in consequence essentially shape the construction of reality. Both Ines Hochgerner and Benedek Regős put forward fundamental questions regarding the “reality” of images, their effect and efficacy, and hence the mechanisms and auxiliary routines of visual culture as well. While Benedek Regős in his examination of the figure of the cartographer and land surveyor also raises the issue of the political implications of the image, Ines Hochgerner’s elliptical interrogations of images open up a media-ontological dimension.
Benedek Regős Untitled (from the series Angle and Distance), 2021 © Benedek Regős www.benedekregos.hu
In the horizontal, loosely mounted image series Angle and Distance, Benedek Regős examines, in an almost image-poetic manner, the figure of the land surveyor as well as the practice of mapmaking as a pictorial instrument of the ordering and organization of space. The photographs and depictions, selected from a highly diverse range of sources and dates, show less the act of surveying or the geometrizing process but rather portray the phantasm of mapmaking itself. Thus, Regős points to the constructed nature of an image direction that also contains explicit political implications via practices of drawing up borders and social in- and exclusion. Alluding to and applied to the specifically selected, predominantly photographic form of presentation, Regős ultimately also subjects this regime of the gaze, i.e. the photographic dispositif, to an allusive and subtle critical analysis.
Ines Hochgerner, „There are so many horizons“ 2020/21 Siebdruck auf Papier//silk screen on paper 100 x 70 cm, Unikat/single piece www.ineshochgerner.com
In the expansive wall installation There Are So Many Horizons by Ines Hochgerner, viewers are faced with a sprawling image configuration that covers the entire wall and is based on the vertically structured repetition of an abstract pattern. The black-and-white schematic is faintly reminiscent of anthropomorphic forms or also the traces of an image narrative. Similarly, it is possible to discern the abstracted schemata of hands in three framed pictures directly mounted on the wallpapered structure, whose visual appearance has long freed itself from its pictorial object (the hand). Employing reciprocal processes of the visual narrative and through an interlocked sequence of alienation and abstraction between digital prints, scans, and analogue prints, Hochgerner not only decouples the connection between image and pictorial object; moreover, she converts the initially seemingly flat image space (of the single prints) into a multidimensional image spatiality, which essentially also translates the temporal dimension, i.e. the work done to and with the image, into a sensuous, tangible form.
Both Ines Hochgerner and Benedek Regős work with images in order to be able to think about images. In their reflections, they do not stop at media-ontological considerations but advance questions, in a thoroughly meta-pictorial and abstract manner, about the respective aesthetic efficacy and performance of the image (Hochgemer) as well as its politics and politicization (Regős).