JANA SEEHUSEN | *tagesarchiv

Opening: Friday, 2 October 2009, 7 p.m.

Exhibition: 3 - 24 October 2009

Are images and emotions about to replace words and arguments? How do photographic images regulate our world? Do they really have the powerful impact attributed to them in today’s discourses? With her installation *tagesarchiv, Jana Seehusen places herself in between these questions, approaching them with a mix of words and images: she creates an ambiguous web of headlines and press photographs, where text and image mutually perforate each other. 

Apart from sculptural works (drawing, montage, video, book), the exhibition revolves around Seehusen’s personal >daily archive<, a collection of press photographs and text fragments collected since 2005 and turned into an accessible space. The montage principle emerges here as a key element in Seehusen’s work. While her panorama sequences >this reality at last< show images of isolated events mounted almost seamlessly to new plot lines, the roughness of the cuts in her >daily archive< are instantly apparent. By uncoupling word and image, she reveals the scintillating fabric of the imagined and the media image; the gap between documentation and fiction, authenticity and staging, is perceptible. 

Using the word/image/archive as a raw material store and point of departure for the work, a complex space of intellectual/cravings and collecting/obsessions is opened up in an omnipresence of media images. Apart from diverse patterns of order and meaning, Seehusen’s word and image arrangements show word/image condensations that allow for the appearance of cross connections between collecting, preserving and archiving, on the one hand, and memory processes such as collective image retention, on the other. 

In *tagesarchiv, Seehusen designs a space in which to deal with approaches to words and images. Both detailed and complex, the text/image networks challenge our perception as well as our memory of specific media figures and events. The montage of fragments from the word/image/archive, which is left entirely to the individual, allows for a continuum of new approaches to the world, where the border between fiction and documentary and between word and image becomes so blurred as to be almost invisible. Welcome to reality.