To all of our readers in Berlin, go check out Ornella Fieres new exhibtion, "Looks like you tried to go somewhere that does not exist," that opens on November 27 at Sexauer Gallery.
This could be the best name of a gallery show we have heard in a really long time. The show runs through Juanuary 9, 2016
Here is an excerpt from catalogue text by Tina Sauerländer:
Ornella Fieres toys with our senses and wits. The artist takes analogue and digital photographies. She takes photos of reality and of images. Images that she paints using the computer programme Photoshop and images that become visible on screens. Some of the photo- graphed images resemble reality. Others are loose image inventions. We can never be sure what it is that we are seeing. This not-knowing relates to the images them- selves as well as the depicted. And even if Ornella Fieres’ photographies depict something that really took place, it is never entirely clear whether what we see is a document or a mise-en-scène. Ornella Fieres deceives our viewing patterns and expectations but she also shows that we– children of the internet age – can cope with that insecurity without a problem.
The belief in chronology of time and in infinity has long been history. Ever since Einstein, Planck or Heisenberg time and space are mutually dependent and there are no established facts anymore. We think on various levels, parallel universes, and in several versions. The imagin- ation of only one reality has been abandoned. The ques- tion about reality’s truth has become redundant. Indexicality is discarded in a world in which digital images imitate reality to the point that it has become impossible to recognize the difference. And yet, the visual sense is the most important one in the internet age in which reality expands behind a lit up surface.
“Looks like you tried to go somewhere that does not exist” is what a computer says after clicking on a link whose target page has already been erased from the internet’s memory. This sentence, which is almost philo- sophically romantic, reminds us of the fact that behind the virtual universe there is a real human being which has programmed the very same thing. Moreover, it is reminiscent of the fact that ‘going’ has a different meaning in relation to the internet. There, we find images of the ocean depth, the Amazon jungle or the Himalaya right next to photographies of space–places that one probably never will visit and see with ones own eyes. Images that were made by using lenses of gadgets convey a certain reality just like NASA photographs being supposed to visualize everyday reality in the universe.
