Degrees of Stillness

Degrees of Stillness is the theme of Kicken Berlin's spring exhibition, which opens in the first weekend of May to coincide with Gallery Weekend Berlin. It brings together five contemporary artists whose pictures address the central paradigm of photography: captured time. The works of Dieter Appelt, Jitka Hanzlová, Ryuji Miyamoto, Hans-Christian Schink and Alfred Seiland project different levels of stillness, from calm concentration to the patient, precise measurement of reality. The works reveal that modern photography's way of seeing the world allows the emergence of the aesthetic hidden within nature, architecture, cityscapes, and everyday objects.
Time is the main subject in Dieter Appelt’s work "Das Feld #3". The Tableau shows ever new variations of the same spot in a river. The 2 dimensional arrangement of the sequences combines the sequential moments of each individual exposure to underline the singularity of each instant. Jitka Hanzlová (born 1958) remains bound to her native Bohemia, whether in the still-lifes of her series on the village "Rokytník" or in the intensely mythical images of "Forest," with their dream landscapes of fields and woods. Nature's strong force of attraction, through atmospheric details, mushrooms, logs, and blades of grass, is also conveyed in the series "Vielsalm," made in the Belgian resort of the same name. Austrian Alfred Seiland (born 1952), who traveled up and down the East and West Coasts of the United States on a classic road trip, is on the trail of the American dream. Color and light define his pictures, whether in strong contrast or in gentle gradation, whether they take in broad surfaces or focus on the smallest details. Houses, cars, and manifestations of leisure culture like the amusement park "Ocean Beach, Connecticut" combine to convey quiet signs of the civilized but nonetheless deserted American periphery. Hans-Christian Schink (born 1961) subjects the landscapes in his series "1h" to the strict concept of showing the passage of time through the course of the sun even as he arrests it photographically. The presence of the heavenly body is visible as a black trace in this group of solarized one-hour time exposures, which received the 2008 Real Photography Award. The period of time is always the same, but the angle of the black band varies considerably, depending on the season and the latitude of the location, from Leipzig to Dubai. At the center of the early black and white photography of Ryuji Miyamoto (born 1947) are abandoned or destroyed buildings, depicted with a precise and at the same time poetic objectivity – for example, in his picture of the flooded bunker of the Japanese embassy in Berlin. Works from his series "Kobe 1995. After the Earthquake" will be on view in the project room Kicken II. After the devastating earthquake of January 1995, Miyamoto captured the city's ruinous, liminal state in one of his best known series, which was included in documenta XI.
(Carolin Förster)