nach/sichten. Video Works from the Goetz Collection
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The German title of this exhibition plays on notions of visual perception, viewing, re-viewing and on the reflections that are triggered, whereby our thoughts mirror what we have seen.
Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg
With Hans Op de Beeck, Andrea Bowers, David Claerbout, Stan Douglas, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Jeanne Faust, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Laurie Simmons, Mathilde ter Heijne and Andro Wekua.
The German title of this exhibition plays on notions of visual perception, viewing, re-viewing and on the reflections that are triggered, whereby our thoughts mirror what we have seen. The pictorial worlds evoked by the works thus appear as visually constructed spaces in which the unequivocal is called into question and the complexity of multiple meaning prevails. This common theme links all the works in the exhibition. They play with the viewer’s perceptions, operate with fragments of cinematic vocabulary and narratives familiar from film and television. They evoke visual memories and associations with known images. At the same time, the content is explicitly political. Hans Op de Beeck and Juan Manuel Echavarría, for instance, address such issues as the problem of refugees from the so-called Third World or the social and political impact of the cocaine trade, while Andrea Bowers and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster use their work to highlight the debate about abortion in the USA and the significance and use of the White Sands atomic bomb testing site. Other works, such as that of Jeanne Faust, focus on the question of the filmic construction of time and space.
