Alexandra Vogt / Bert Sissingh

Alexandra Vogt Alexandra Vogt (1970) is the stage manager of dreams. Sensual, fragile, bizarre, tormenting. In a dichotomy of dreams and nightmares the artist plumbs the depth of archetypal as well as autobiographical fantasies. As vehicle of her dreams she has chosen two protagonists: Eva, the fair stablegirl and Toni, the white horse, with whom she will also make a performance on the opening night of the show. The stable of a former manor of a convent is production center and the stage for her project. An artificially produced naturalness of situations constitutes Vogt's working grounds. Secondhand clothes and abandonned implements from the congregational surroundings serve as requisites for her mise en scène. Half document, half arranged, her works include both, her personal surroundings and elements of her biography as well as the physical condition of horse and stablegirl. In order to serve her project the artist surrounds herself with the conventionality and daily madness of a parochial life in the bavarian countryside. Only under such conditions it is possible to create works that show autobiographical and identity-establishing moments of her own puberty as well as an archetypal longing - represented in the figure of the stablegirl - for self-abandonment, devotion, security and new departures. Vogt's project is capable of integrating boths sides of the coin: the girls' flight into silky dreams contrasted by the very reason of the girl's escapism, namely a disillusionned adulthood. Alexandra Vogt chooses to move on the borderline between dream and nightmare, between Bilitis and Blue Velvet. This conflict, a floating condition between departures and inhibitions, fear and thirst for adventure, virginity and obscenity, tenderness and brutality create this very special aura of mistery and discomfort of her photographs

Bert Sissingh In his new photoseries Bert Sissingh (1956) further elaborates the thematics he started in his very first series entitled The End of History, in which he portrayed himself together with his real aged parents. Remarkable difference with the earlier series is the (felt) absence of the mother, which automatically emphasizes the relation to the father. In these new registrations of a kind of self-directed regression the space of the 'complete Oedipus complex' is being explored in which deep layers of early psychic development seem to be touched upon. By referring in image and title more or less explicitely to western traditions of painting (Piero, Brueghel) and thought (Freud, [post]-structuralism) hybid photoworks are being produced in which photograph and painting, text and image, dream and reality, signifier and signified compete for attention. In the final analysis this leads to a definition of the photographic image in which an attempt is made to reach beyond a (all too human) documentary humanism, as the attentive observer already has concluded from the ironic use of the title for the new series.

Pressetext

Alexandra Vogt "RIDE ME HOME"

Bert Sissingh "The Family of Man"