Heimspiel

The selected artistic positions touch on themes and realms situated between imagination and reality. An exploration of the surreal, the apocalyptic, the psychoanalytic can extend in a variety of directions and draw from various visual genres. In the arts, visual aesthetics and forms of expression in these domains never completely die out and periodically return in an intensified form. These “times of magic” are often a reaction to the loss of fixed references, rules, or systems. The concept of gestalt, appearing in the early twentieth century, occupies the line 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, during times of stable references, these are dealt with artistically using irony, conceptual shifts, or theoretical concepts. The aesthetic and conceptual phase of the 1990s and 2000s can be described as such. With the proliferation of the internet and smartphones in the 2010s, more and more content was being uploaded 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 are beginning to touch our everyday lives and the text format as a reality coordinate seems to have 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 we no longer presume that we can stop or break them. Fantasy aesthetics are a direct reaction to such times. The concept of gestalt, a topos of German-speaking intellectual history, denotes the transition between the external world of perception and the inner world of imagination. It conflates the active nature of action and the passivity of perception, forming a unity in which the transition between perception and meaning is merged.

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