Rainer Strzolka

Vacantness Rainer Strzolka

For the first time, this exhibition catalog combines all photographs of an installation on the Carlsen farm from May 25, 2020. All of the photographs shown here have not yet been published. They form the first volume of the Corona Diaries, which show that the pandemic is also an opportunity for reflection and withdrawal from the hustle and bustle of the world. All photographs were taken on Kodak Tri-X film and with Leica M6. Rainer Strzolka (°1956, Berlin, Germany) makes photos and conceptual artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Strzolka absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation. His collected, altered and own photos are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. Rainer Strzolka currently lives and works in Leipzig.