Heimspiel

The selected artistic positions touch thematically on domains occupying the border between imagination and reality. An exploration of the surreal, the apocalyptic, the psychoanalytic can extend in a variety of directions and make use of various visual genres. In the arts, visual aesthetics and forms of expression from these domains never completely vanish and return cyclically in an intensified form. Such “magical times” are often periods in which previously fixed references have been lost. The concept of “gestalt” appears at the border between imagination and reality. It describes the external form or manifestation of a perception, its representation as well as its impacts and presence.

By contrast, in times when fixed references exist, these are dealt with from an artistic perspective with irony, conceptual shifts, or theoretical concepts. The latest return of such aesthetics and concepts can be traced to the 1990s and 2000s. With the proliferation of the internet and smartphones in the 2010s, more and more people were suddenly uploading their content to the web, all knowledge of the past and present seemed accessible, and the end of the world predicted for 2012 did not happen. Algorithmic processes began to have an impact on daily life and the text format as a “fixer” of reality seemingly lost its dominance. While cultural authenticity was still important in the 1990s and 2000s, signs and symbols have now lost their clear meaning. Many things mean many different things to many people. Perhaps this is the apocalypse: a permanent loop of disorientation without fixed ethics and symbols. It seems as if “the codes are programming us” (Villém Flusser), but even more so that we no longer presume that we can stop or break them. Aesthetics of the fantastic are a direct reaction to such times. The concept of gestalt, as a topos of German-speaking intellectual history, signifies this problem of transition from the externally perceptible world to the inner world of imagination. It combines the activity of action with the passivity of perception, forming a unity in which the transition between perception and meaning is merged.

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