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artist / participant
press release
Konrad Fischer Galerie presents Juergen Staack at abc - art berlin contemporary
Sep 15th—Sep 18th, 2016
The photographic series WEI (Chinese for Hello) is based on photographs taken by Juergen Staack in the Hutongs of Beijing. Hutongs are a traditional style of residential building, comprising of courtyards and narrow alleyways. Over the course of centuries the city structure of Beijing has come to be characterised by these austere one- and two-storey building complexes. The dominant colour is grey, the people‘s colour, based on a centuries-old tradition.
In the alleyways of the Hutongs, printouts and small posters are often put up, illegally offering private services. Rather than being removed, these posters are mostly painted over in different grey tones, and thus erased, by state employed ‘painting troops‘. Through this process, unintended abstract wall paintings are created, especially when the posters buckle, fall off or are torn from the walls, leaving behind framed grey empty spaces permeated by an aesthetic of negation, drawing their potential from absurdity.
Juergen Staack noted down telephone numbers from the posters before they were overpainted. In the accompanying audio installation, recordings of phone calls can be heard where the phone of the person being called is switched off or where the number no longer exists.
WEI (deframed) is a continuation of the series WEI, which describes a similar phenomenon that has since become less common. Instead of posters advertising services, telephone numbers are directly spray-painted onto the walls, and are then painted over by the ‚officials‘ with whichever colours they have to hand, resulting in abstract gestural paintings.