THE INVERSIONS OF KLAUS PAMMINGER
In the physical spaces of Galerie Raum mit Licht, Klaus Pamminger projects his experimental short films. These are themselves the filmed versions of individual photographic works. The multi-layered “photo intarsia” – collaged and intricately nested photographs – show the rooms of the artist’s apartment in which, however, the scenes from classic motion pictures are embedded, populating the spaces like hallucinations. Each of the eight short films from his work Rauminvasionen – Serie 1 (or Space Invasions – Series 1) references a specific work in film history, a certain vision, since the film is generated from a single still image: the photograph as intarsia. Pamminger’s films are presented in endless loops.
In what appears to be ostensible classic photographic works, the space then becomes fluent through the invasion of foreign images. Hence the interweaving of levels of space brings about
the concurrence of the most non-concurrent times. The apparently static photographs experience through dreamtime an underlying structure and thereby become films that produce a space, that by the same token appears to be static. Michel Foucault considers the cinema to be a heterotopic space, because it offers the possibility to be simultaneously present in spaces of different orders: in the space of movie theater as well as in the spaces of the motion picture. Klaus Pamminger plays with the confusion of these two levels by exponentially increasing the heterotopia: La Belle du Jour lolls on the artist’s loft bed. In the gallery, these situations become something one can tangibly experience through the presence of real objects, fragments from the motion pictures. The order of the spaces in the gallery corresponds to that of the film locations, the artist’s apartment becomes accessible to visitors. Light boxes and photographs add a further level to the organization of space. Finding oneself “in the film”, sharpens one’s sense to the modus operandi behind this complex framework of individual media and diverse spaces of reality in the images. When the human being is “the moviegoing animal” (Giorgio Agamben), it could live in such a cave.
Text: Daniela Hoelzl