by Bettina Reichmuth

Just before you awaken, an idea, a fleeting image sometimes passes through your mind, half in a dream, half linked to reality. Carried by fantastic frequencies, things enter your head, without thinking. A resourceful, time-less moment. Kerstin Flake’s new photographic work running out is suspended in a state like this, between waking and sleeping, fiction and documentation, past and present.

East Germany. A deserted industrial building, storage space for history since 1895. The old routines of the workers have been declared dead; all time windows have been closed. In accordance with her characteristic way of working, Flake uses these unoccupied spaces to create time-space-structures in which physical laws no longer play a role, where purposelessness reigns. Using a plate camera, she then transfers her temporary installations onto the surface of the photographic image. To this end, she does not isolate her motif in order to “capture“ it. She enters the abandoned rooms with the purpose of liberating the found objects from their former functional contexts.

They have been waiting there for an indefinite period of time: workers‘ trousers, boots, brushes, tables, oil cans, baseboards, paper bags. Kerstin Flake searches for resonances to make the rooms vibrate and bridge the gap between epochs. What potential is hidden in the material lying around here, which direction do all the casting moulds aspire to take? Flake takes stock, collects, arranges, installs, combines, finally lets the relics of the past float in fake stills, parade, dance a vibrating twist.

However, the tension of Flake’s photographs arises only in part from the deceptive staging of weightless objects. The way in which they break away from old patterns of order makes it impossible to overlook how, through the passage of time, new worlds can arise in the same spaces, and how this distance is simultaneously fixed in the picture: “… the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself.” (Susan Sontag).

Kerstin Flake’s photographs make the disturbing moment of transience productive, they begin with the end. Photography itself is exhibited as an open medium with hyper-realistic potential: the point where reality ends is where photography is able to leave its frame.

A woman seems to have been left behind in these old factory workshops. A surrealistic muse, a ghostly secretary or perhaps just a visitor from the present? She lies dreaming between inoperative machines, then emerges, „ad acta“, between papers and folders. A gust of wind passes through.

Bettina Reichmuth

von Bettina Reichmuth

Kurz vor dem Aufwachen huscht manchmal eine Idee, ein Bild vorbei, halb im Traum, halb verknüpft mit der Wirklichkeit. Fantastische Frequenzen bringen den Kopf auf Dinge ohne nachzudenken. Ein erfinderischer, zeit-loser Moment. In einen ebensolchen Zustand zwischen Wachen und Schlafen, Fiktion und Dokumentation, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart eingespannt ist die neue Foto-Arbeit running out von Kerstin Flake.

Ostdeutschland. Ein leerstehendes Industriegebäude, Geschichtsspeicher seit 1895. Die alten Routinen der Belegschaft sind für tot erklärt, alle Zeitfenster geschlossen. Entsprechend ihrer charakteristischen Arbeitsweise nutzt Flake diese unbesetzten Räume, um Zeit-Raum-Gefüge zu schaffen, in denen physikalische Gesetze keine Rolle mehr spielen und die Zweckfreiheit regiert. Mithilfe einer Plattenkamera überträgt sie ihre temporären Installationen dann auf die Fläche des fotografischen Bildes. Dafür kreist die Fotografin ihr Motiv nicht ein, um es „einzufangen“. Sie begibt sich in die stillgelegten Räume hinein, um die vorgefundenen Gegenstände aus ihren ehemaligen Funktionszusammenhängen zu befreien.

Sie harren dort seit unbestimmter Zeit: Arbeiterhosen, Stiefel, Bürsten, Tische, Ölkannen, Bodenleisten, Papiertüten. Kerstin Flake sucht nach Resonanzen, die die Räume in Schwingung bringen und die Kluft zwischen den Epochen überbrücken. Welche Potenziale verbergen sich im herumliegenden Material, wohin wollen die vielen Gussformen? Flake macht Bestandsaufnahmen, sammelt, arrangiert, installiert, kombiniert, lässt die Relikte der Vergangenheit in gefakten Stills schließlich schweben, aufmarschieren, einen vibrierenden Twist tanzen.

Ihre Spannung beziehen Flakes Fotografien aber nur zum Teil aus der täuschenden Inszenierung schwereloser Objekte. Deren plötzliches Ausbrechen aus alten Ordnungsmustern lässt unübersehbar werden, wie in denselben Räumen durch das Verstreichen der Zeit neue Welten auferstehen können und wie dieser Abstand zugleich im Bild fixiert wird: „Die Surrealisten erkannten nicht, dass das […] irrationalste, geheimnisvollste und der Assimilationsfähigkeit am weitesten entzogene Phänomen – die Zeit selbst ist.“ (Susan Sontag)
Die Fotografien von Kerstin Flake machen das verstörende Moment der Vergänglichkeit produktiv, nehmen das Ende als Anfang. Auch die Fotografie selbst wird als ein offenes Medium mit hyperrealistischem Potenzial ausgestellt: Wo Realität aufhört, kann auch Fotografie ihren Rahmen verlassen.

Eine Frau scheint in diesen alten Werkhallen wie übrig geblieben. Surrealistische Muse, spukende Sekretärin oder doch ein Besuch aus der Gegenwart? Sie liegt träumend zwischen stillgelegten Maschinen, taucht dann, „ad acta“ gelegt, zwischen Papieren und Ordnern auf. Ein Windstoß fährt hindurch.

Bettina Reichmuth

by Bettina Reichmuth

Kerstin Flake created her analogue photo series “Replaces” (2012) in rooms we know as “studios”, or which, indistinguishable from these, are defined as such through her work. The question of a place where all external influences can be neutralised is also based on the conceptual image of the studio, which is closely linked to the activity of the artist: inspiration, coincidence, transfer. Assertion and pose. The studio as a frame of reference for the entire working process of the artist.
When Flake simulates a neutral studio situation, she begins a game of questions: to what extent does art production depend on the context? Can an artist transform a space into a studio by means of art? And finally: if photography itself is not unambiguous, how flexible are concepts? Similar aspects interest her about the objects and people she has chosen for her arrangements. She reworks hierarchies, perspectives and functions until all the components shed their semiotic ballast and merge into new installations. In this analogue process of abstraction, tables, chairs, lamps and people become animated objects in equal measure, from theatrical to bewilderingly surreal in their posture and implied movement. Further distance is created through photographic documentation in the form of „portraits“. Or are they moments in a mysterious film, there but not there, in a way that only a large-format camera can create? The human figure is presented from behind, headless or weightless. Floating fabric capsules, poles, frames, two legs projected across the picture seem like fantasies whose geometric forms on paper suddenly become spatial drawings.

The gallery visitor sees the studio and the temporary metamorphosis of the art objects from a kind of internal auditorium. But the insight “behind the scenes” turns out to be a view of the stage – with no backdrops. Here, reality is exhibited as something that is constantly restaged: like reoccurring thoughts, some things appear several times, the figure repeats variations of dancing poses until it drops – a spontaneous choreography with its own rules, a bizarre balancing act that never ends. On the other hand, the fact that it is staged within the gallery space as a series of photographs points towards an answer to the question formulated by Godard: „How do you put reality into reality?”

Bettina Reichmuth