Offers for Communication - Photos

installationview: "Willkommen Zuhause!", Kunstverein Schwaebisch Hall, 2005

The "offers for communication" show interieurs, which were mainly taken in second-hand furniture stores. With skillful arrangements of the groups of seats it is tried to simulate the existence of intimate and private sectors in the open and at the same time anonymous situations of those huge showrooms.

By focussing onto one single arrangement the photographs try to fade out the open and anonymous situation as far as possible. At the same time the viewers attention is directed onto the apparent intimicy of the arranged furniture. Nevertheless the viewer is aware of the fact that the presented situation is not taken from a private space.

These dwelling productions do present us possible basic conditions for our everyday "communication emergency". But nevertheless they remain empty offers and substitute symbols - space keepers for potential but not yet present participants - with the contents to be filled in later. They remain as rigid seat furniture stagings with standardized relations and distances to each other and at the same time a projection surface for our idea of an ideal situation of well balanced communication.

Even without participants the viewer can imagine possible communication situations, which yet follow involuntarily the given pattern of the installation. Thus those "private areas" become communication promises, which produce discrepancy between desire and reality - between fullfilled and disappointed expectation.

installationview: "Willkommen Zuhause!", Kunstverein Schwaebisch Hall, 2005
(front: installation of Gert Bendel, back: Peter Freitag)

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