Appearance and Time

In her second exhibition at SEXAUER, Ornella Fieres examines the epistemological question about the image and the meaning of time. She explores the transitions between analogue and digital imagery and investigates the information loss generated by the attempt to capture moments. For years she has been developing image and audio techniques for this purpose.

For the exhibition »The Recurring Frequency of a Fading Moment«, Ornella Fieres worked with photography and film material from the 1940s to the 1970s. In the series “The Essence of a Moment / Fourier” (small frames with two pictures) she displays a historical photograph next to its visualized Fourier transformation. A mathematical fingerprint of the image is created. The pictures next to each other indicate the same meaning, the same instance. But only the photographic image is accessible to the human visual comprehension. This juxtaposition of two forms of representation not only underlines and visualizes the different ways of analyzing data, but also raises the much older question of what an image actually is.

The series “The Essence of a Moment / Inverse Fourier” (large pictures) is a continuation of the technique described above. In these images, Fieres deletes data from the Fourier analysis and converts it back into an image. The destruction process is intuitive and can only be controlled by the artist to a limited extent. In other words: After the artist’s destructive intervention, the computer constructs a new moment using the remaining data from an old photograph. The Recurring Frequency of a Fading Moment. The artist experiments with this lack of control in an almost alchemistic manner. Her works refer to our daily exposure to algorithms that we do not know, comprehend or have power over. The third part of the exhibition consists of a video installation with three screens showing old documentary film recordings. In her research work, Ornella Fieres repeatedly encounters photographs of television screens from the 1950s to 1970s. This act of capturing made the artist herself record old documentaries off of computer screens. Fieres then slowed down these sound and image recordings by over a thousand times. The slow motion makes technically inexplicable pixel transitions, like mysterious artifacts, visible.

Ornella Fieres’ research work conjures moments from the past. We see people we don’t know and who are probably no longer alive. Through the transformation, deconstruction and manipulation of the information carriers and narrative mediums, questions of continuity, depiction, repetition, appearances, perception, readability, time and narrative arise anew. The Recurring Frequency of a Fading Moment.

March 10 — April 14, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, March 9, 6 – 9 pm
Facebook Event

Sexauer Gallery

Streustraße 90, 13086 Berlin
[Weißensee | Pankow]

Opening hours: Wed – Sat 1 – 6 pm, and by appointment

Admission free