Anett Stuth
Haben Sie nichts vergessen?
27.06. – 01.08.2010

Anett Stuth’s photographs are pictures. But where the conventional photographic image suggests the unity of place, time and motif, the photographer, born in 1965, spans several places, different times and different genres.
Viewed from a distance, one sees ONE photograph. A uniform composition in which other spaces and perspectives open up as if by chance. The simultaneity of divergent images and worlds only becomes apparent when viewed up close. Constellations that we have never thought of before. Past and present combine to form enigmatic associative loops that we might remember from our dreams. - Have you forgotten anything?
The Berlin-based artist elicits illusionistic architectures from the photographic collage, whose image quotations make references to reality that are as irritating as they are humorous. At the blue hour, Diane Arbus meets René Magritte in “Seestück”, and in a club, Banksy’s rat greets Christiane F., while Klausjürgen Wussow cheers Renton from “Trainspotting”: “I can drink without having fun”. Image quotations from history, from the history of film, art or photography are assembled and collaged with shots of everyday situations or the permanent news ticker. But the familiar becomes strangely alien in these photographs.
Anett Stuth completed her photography studies at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, where she first studied with Arno Fischer from 1991 and later with Timm Rautert, graduating as a master student in 1998. Inspired by the discourses surrounding art and reportage photography, documentation and documentary photography, her series “Raum - Zeit - Bild” (Space - Time - Image) from 2003 onwards took her down a path that transcends the conventional dimensions of photographic space and redefines it.
Villem Flusser’s thesis that “only a series of photographs can prove the photographer’s intention” has been refuted by Anett Stuth. It is not the serial sequence, as with Roni Horn, or the archival concentration of motifs, as with Bernd and Hilla Becher, that condenses form and content, but a strategy borrowed from sampling: Anett Stuth creates complex pictorial and mental spaces by carefully scanning the visible surface.
However, unlike appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince, the quotation as an artistic method does not stand for ‘re-photography’ in the sense of self-referential criticism. Rather, it reflects the artist’s dialog with the world around her and her questioning of the medium’s expressive power. What can a photograph convey today in the face of ubiquitous visualization? What do we have to forget for it to still touch us?
For man has forgotten how to decipher the image that he once created in order to orient himself in the world. Like the panther in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem of the same name, we see “no world behind a thousand bars”. With her camera and her keen eye, Anett Stuth explores the gaps between the bars and transforms what she discovers behind them into photographs whose poetic power and sublime humor keep our memory alive and make the polyphony of the world more bearable.

Michaela Nolte

Curated by Thomas Trümper.