Curated by Anna-Lena Werner
06. - 28.04.2012
SAVVY CONTEMPORARY, Berlin
Whenever we speak about absence, we speak about deficiency, inattentiveness, a lack or vanished existence. That is because absence always requires presence, as its temporal structure (if it even has one) is before or behind that, which is present. Absence, then, as that which is not present, represents itself as an unknown trace. Absence might become noticeable as a loss or a missed chance. It cannot be seen, but it can be felt. A banned space, an empty room, distant memories, a latent and fragmentary presence of humanity, character, identity. In visual arts the concept of absence has often led to the visualisation of incompletion. In minimal art, absence substitutes content and subject matter. But absence, too, has an emotional perspective that asks for an empathetic perception. In the works of American painter Edward Hopper, absence manifests itself as emptiness - be it an empty expression or an empty space. But emptiness does not necessarily equal nothingness, as Hopper once told the writer Brian O’Doherty: "I've always been intrigued by an empty room... When we were at school...we debated what a room looked like when there was nobody looking in even.”
In Hopper’s painted rooms, absence suggests presence and Hopper’s protagonists’ presence, apathetically staring out of windows, often turning their back to the gaze of the viewer, suggests absence. It is this affective concept of absence that brings the art works of Lela Ahmadzai and Lars Bjerre together, entering into a visual dialogue between two young positions originating from two extremely different countries. Ahmadzai, an Afghan photographer, and Bjerre, a Danish painter, both follow absence’s trace with their own methodology, curiously searching for what is missing and patiently observing the human aura disappear and reappear.
For her series Burka Meets (2008-2009) Ahmadzai photographically documented burka-wearing women in Kabul, Afghanistan. In these images the strikingly blue burka is always present, whether it is in the pictures’ compositional centre, dominating the townscape’s colours or reflected in the light-blue sky against the sandy foreground of Kabul’s countryside. The artist highlights small details, such as a pair of high heels, ducked body postures or restraint gestures to reveal the absent character, alluding to the women’s inconspicuous identities, their untitled-ness. Her portraits personate the protagonists as isolated, imprisoned under a silenced, anonymous cover, however surrounded by a lively and hectic atmosphere of chatter and street noise. They appear displaced, uninvolved, alien - as if time stood still under the blue fabric. Bjerre, too, portraits his fictional protagonists without revealing their facial identities - a thick layer of pink paint covers the face of a man wearing a suit, his body rests under a picnic-blanket; in other paintings his head is completely wiped-out. In Bjerre’s newest series he replaces the human being with empty, wooden architectures and abandoned conifer-forest landscapes. His mostly large-scale paintings play with an oscillation of human presence and absence – the corporeal human vanishes, but tense absence becomes visible in details: a tilted birdhouse and a pair of boots in a forest’s raised hide, wood that has been cut and stapled, an abandoned hut that offers a peek into its dark inside.
Absence, in Ahmadzai’s portraits and Bjerre’s paintings, embraces a waiting position, because it presents itself as an ephemeral moment that could easily change into something else. In Ahmadzai’s photographs of burka-women, the waiting position emanates from the camera-lens. As Susan Sontag claims in her book Regarding the pain of Others, “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (London: Penguin Books, 2003), Ahmadzai’s camera keeps a hold of the scurrying, inconspicuous ones – friezes them, catches them when they are passing the observer.
The hidden protagonists don’t have time to stand still, because once they slip under the blue uniform, they are following a set goal. Restlessness dominates their appearance – sometimes even resulting in out-of-focus-ness and blurry portraits. As if the photograph was a film-still, there seems to be a latent possibility of it suddenly resuming into play mode, framing the protagonist for one more split-second until she vanishes into one corner of the frame. Bjerre’s wood installations and forest paintings, on the contrary, are dominated by a presumably everlasting stagnancy and silence. Even the birds, sometimes adorning and sometimes occupying of his works, seem to be hushed. This silence, however, is a silence of suspense - similar to the unbearable soundless moments in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. His paintings are beset with uncanniness - an uncomfortable apprehension that someone might return to the deserted scenery. As in a dreamscape, the solidness of heaven and earth crumbles: the sky seems unrealistically flat, the trees miss their leaves, the ground blurs into a non-defined space of thick brushstrokes.
Absence, in Ahmadzai’s and Bjerre’s work, turns into a state of melancholia, even nostalgia. They both return to places from their childhood, but they enter this world with a different motivation - it is not a comfort zone anymore, but a critical confrontation with themselves in a vacuum of time. And it is first and foremost an investigation into the unknown, the incomprehensible. Therefore the exhibition, bringing their artworks together, couldn’t be labelled. There is no title yet.
Lars Bjerre
Lars Bjerre
Lela Ahmadzai
Lela Ahmadzai
