ANJA RONACHER
STIMME
Opening: 28. October 2014, 19h
Exhibition Duration: 29. October – 14. November 2014
Like the title, the voice is founded on its negativity. It lies beyond and before language (Agamben). Something similar can be said of photography, which is also founded on a negative. In keeping with this analogy, the depicted things of humanity that Ronacher has captured in museums in Italy and in Berlin, have been explored in terms of their symbolic content, the sacral function (masks for the death cult, men of sorrows, burial objects), in terms of the their not being directed to anything – phantasms of transcendence, Anja Ronacher’s photographs of objects are filled with darkness. The voice as something lying beyond and before language refers to what lies in the dark. It is here that Ronacher’s photographs are located, on the dark ground (an oceanic void), since “clarity tumbles endlessly into darkness.” (Deleuze). In the pictures, it is the black surrounding things (and blue: the color of transcendence (“beyond heaven and the sea, in a space not of being.” Ramin Schor ), mere light which is not filitered by any image, that is without a negative between the source of light and paper. In a movement of reversal, the analogous photographic process transforms light into darkness. In the pictures, the things have a symbolic function – they can be read as having the quality of (archaic) symbols. The things themselves come before the image, the image thus becomes a place of loss and of postulation: a postulation of magic and the untimely (Severin Dünser)
As Anja Ronacher states, art must be related to fear, drawing here on Georges Bataille: “I believe that if we follow the movement that propels us to want a world without anxiety, to the final consequence, we can only produce a world that is somehow frozen and robbed of human warmth.“. The motif of circling that marks the groundless, the void, the absence of something higher, shapes these photographs. They refer to the “gaze of nothing towards us.” (Blanchot).
“The image, capable of negating nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness directed at us. (…) It is the crack, the spot of this black sun, a state of being torn that beneath the semblance of the blinding shiny surface gives us the negative of inexhaustible negative depth. It is for this reason that the picture seems so deep and so empty (…)”
