ANN-SOFI SIDEN Codex, 1993-2005

Ausstellungsdauer Duration 30. 06. - 30. 07. 2005
   



ANN-SOFI SIDEN
Codex, 1993-2005, Installationsansicht
Christine König Galerie, Wien 2005

ANN-SOFI SIDEN
Codex, 1993-2005, installation view
Christine König Galerie, Vienna 2005

Das visuelle Grundmateriel für die fotografische Serie Semtükvel besteht in unspektakulären Aussen- und Innenräumen wie Liftkabinen, Tunneln, Gewässern oder einem leeren Schaufenster. Diese Motive sind aber auf den ersten Blick nicht erkennbar und oft kaum identifizierbar. Durch den Kamera-Ausschnitt oder Aufnahmen bei Dunkelheit wird die Perspektive stark verändert und verfremdet. Ob man etwas Vertikales oder Horizontales, etwas Flaches oder Räumliches sieht, bleibt unentschieden. Dadurch wird der Blick gleichsam an die äussere Begrenzung des Augenraums, an die Grenze des dreidimensionalen Sehens geführt.
Fodors Bilder sind Grenzmarkierungen, Dokumente eines Grenzgängers.
Nicht allein, weil die Photographien an vielen und fernen Orten entstanden sind, mehr noch, weil sie einer Erkundung des Wahrnehmbaren selbst folgen. Mit der Kamera wird die sichtbare Wirklichkeit an ihre Grenzen verfolgt und  auf die Probe gestellt: läßt sich noch mehr - und anderes sehen, als sich beim Hinsehen zeigt? Hält das Wahrnehmbare noch andere Wahrheiten verborgen, als jene Bilder, die wir erwarten?
Damit schließt Fodor an eine Tradition der frühen Photographie an; an die Zeit, in der - ausser der Faszination durch die Abbildung der Wirklichkeit - dem neuen Medium weitere, und geradezu metaphysische Qualitäten zugesprochen wurden: Etwa die Möglichkeit, die Realität zu "durch"schauen.
Fodor gelingt ein solcher Kamerablick an die Grenzen des Sehens, er erreicht mit seinen photographischen Erkundungen Momente, die uns wie Risse in der Wirklichkeit erscheinen: Das irritierend Fremde, Unbekannte und manchmal Rätselhafte seiner Bilder zeigt uns die Markierung und läßt uns jenseits der Grenze  neues und anderes Sichtbares ahnen.

Cathrin Pichler, Wien 2005

  

The basic material for the photographic series Semtükvel consists of unspectacular exterior and interior spaces such as lift cabins, tunnels, bodies of water or an empty shop window. However, these motifs are at first sight unrecognisable and often barely identifiable. The perspective is greatly altered and alienated by means of cropped negative areas or shots taken in the darkness. It remains uncertain whether one is seeing something vertical or horizontal, flat or spatial. In this way the eye is gradually led towards the outer boundary of visual space, to the border of three-dimensional vision.
Fodor’s pictures are boundary demarcations, the record of a frontier crosser. Not simply because the photographs were taken at great many different and distant places, but rather because they are an exploration of what is perceptible. The camera is used to pursue visible reality to its limits and then put it to the test: can still more and other things be seen than those which emerge at first glance? Does the perceptible conceal still other truths than the images that we expect?
In this way, Fodor continues a tradition of early photography, a period in which – apart from its fascination with depicting reality – further and almost metaphysical qualities were being attributed to the new medium: for example the possibility of ‘seeing through’ reality.
Fodor achieves this kind of camera view on the border of vision, his photographic explorations attain moments that seem like cracks in reality: the irritatingly foreign, unfamiliar and sometimes puzzling nature of his pictures show us the demarcation and give us a sense that new and unexpected things are visible beyond the border.

Cathrin Pichler, Vienna 2005

  
       
       
Installation mit 11 Fotos und 11 Textplatten gedruckt auf s/w Photofaserpapier plus Video-Projektion CODEX  

Installation of 11 photographs and 11 textplates, printed on b/w fiber photo paper, plus video-projection CODEX

“History is the shelf inside all of us. Judicial records make people visible in remote spots of history. By transcending the law these people exist. And by the laborious manuscripts of the recording clerks in books thick as record collections the protocols uncover objectively parts of the life of the individual. This has been the point of departure in my work with CODEX. I have chosen to pay attention to eleven women because of the fact that their fates would presumably never had been represented anywhere else than in the confrontation with the law.
The fact that I have succeeded in realizing this project is due to cooperation with and engagement in people who have helped me.” Ann-Sofi Sidén

 

ANN-SOFI SIDÉN
Codex
 
Who is the woman? Den stora ondskan i Valais 1992 („The great evil in Valais“), the anthropologist and sociologist Eva Kärfve shows how the outbreak of witch hunts in fifteenth-century Switzerland was largely symptomatic of the mounting conflict between official Christianity and the diverse notions held by ordinary people. The Christian orthodoxy was increasingly „Manichean“, and divisions into good and evil, light and darkness became correspondingly stricter, whereas in the folk culture people continued to grapple with a pluralism that implied that good and evil manifest themselves in different degrees, without strict dividing lines between them. There were no fixed dichotomies and all transgressions were always as much possible as impossible; a sort of „postmodern“ condition prevailed.
The womanhood is characterized by a rejection of absolute dualism, just as the mediaeval consciousness was a sort of split consciousness within a self whose identity had not yet been fixed by what has been termed the universal dissection diagram of Rationalism and the Enlightenment. Christ was both God and Man; woman and man, just as the Devil was both evil and good. She woh is skilled in herbal healing as well as in abortion and contraception techniques, rules over life and death, becomes a metaphor for what simple dichotomous thinking is forced to define as alien and therfore dangerous. The witch must be driven out, marginalised, criminalised, and ultimately killed.
Like a boil on the prevailing phallic orders
The witch is like the stranger defined by Kristeva in Etrangers à nous mêmes (1988). She is the obverse side of identity; she is its potential for continual transgression and endless position-shifting against the Paternal, male, phallocentric Law and its hierarchical exercise of power. The woman is the stranger who challenges the absolute limits and permanent exclusions of the patriarchal system, and according to Kristeva, it is also worth noticing that the first strangers in our culture were women, the Danaides of Greek mythology. Xenophobia, fear of the stranger, and misogyny, hatred of women, come together in male oppression, which ever since the Renaissance has sought to preserve its now increasingly fragile dominance by employing subtler and subtler modes of punishment: the trial by water, the stocks, the Spanish violin, the spinning wheel, marriage, nationalism, the official refugee policy...
„The City Stones“ constitute one such mode of punishment, as Ann-Sofi Sidén demonstrated at Stockholm City Museum´s spring 1992 exhibition „Displacements“, which was held jointly with the College of Fine Arts. The adulteress is banished from the city with a heavy weight of stones, extending the original concept and exhorting us all to acknowledge what is different, that otherness within ourselves which we encounter in those we meet. Thank you, Ann-Sofi!
Tom Sandqvist in ANN-SOFI SIDÉN: Codex, Riksutställningar 1993

 

  
GYULA FODOR Semtükvel