VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
PREVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY LEAP IN TIME: ERICH SALOMON AND BARBARA KLEMM Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 7 Feb–Sun 5 Apr
Two German photographers who documented major events in their country’s history more than 50 years apart are the subject of a new Stills exhibition. Erich Salomon’s images capture the key i gures of the 1920s Weimar Republic, while Barbara Klemm’s evocative pictures take up the story from the 1960s student protests through to the Berlin Wall’s fall. Stills director Ben Harman says this show is part of a broadening
focus for the gallery. ‘I’m keen to explore different types of photography and this exhibition shows how poignant and important documentary photography is. The images depict not only key moments in German history but some of the 20th century’s historic milestones. Both Salomon and Klemm regarded themselves as photojournalists rather than artists, but now their work is shown in exhibitions. It’s interesting to ask if a photographic image does change from one to the other.’
Salomon used his high society background to mingle with the great and the good of Weimar Germany, sometimes photographing them in unguarded moments by using a camera hidden inside his hat. By photographing a brief golden age, he also captured a society on the brink of change.
‘In a way, he accidentally documented the rise of the Nazis,
because he was friends with a lot of powerful i gures,’ says Harman of Salomon who died in Auschwitz alongside his wife and son. ‘What he ended up doing was documenting that era with his camera and then becoming a victim himself.’ Described as a German Jane Bown, Klemm’s lens captured post-
war history unfolding. Working for many years at the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she liked to focus on ordinary people, though she has also photographed the famous, from Joseph Beuys to Angela Merkel. (Susan Mansi eld)
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REVIEW PRINTMAKING AND ANIMATION DAVID LEMM: DEBRIS AND PHENOMENA Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 7 Mar ●●●●● REVIEW FILM INSTALLATION WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH: BEAUTY AND THE RIGHT TO THE UGLY Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 29 Mar ●●●●●
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PREVIEW GROUP SHOW TILL THE STARS TURN COLD Glasgow Sculpture Studios, until Sat 14 Mar
Till the Stars Turn Cold is a partnership project with Shefi eld’s S1 Artspace, which brings together six international artists who all explore the ever-present balance of power and fragility within the human voice. The title is taken from a scene in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s classic 1952 Hollywood musical Singin’ in the Rain, where singer and actress Kathy Selden’s voice is dubbed over Lina Lamont as she sings: ’our love will last till the stars turn cold’.
This technological sewing together of voice and body from two separate performers provides a thematic starting point for this exhibition, featuring works by Tyler Coburn, Michael Dean, Kathryn Elkin, Josh Kline, Megan Rooney and Cally Spooner. Each artist in turn explores the ways the voice can relate to objects, bodies and situations, using footage of historically popular i gures and celebrities taken from mass media.
This new Collective Gallery in the old City Observatory atop Calton Hill might inspire comparisons between a Georgian architecture- saturated panorama outside and the drum-like brick interior’s intimacy. Intentionally or not, this i lm piece by Dutch artist van Oldenborgh gives some release to that sensation. The work condenses three separate i lm pieces on the same subject – Eindhoven’s Het Karregat, an open-plan public community centre designed by the architect Frank van Klingeren – in a manner which works as an installation as much as a i lm document. Standing within an arrangement of three angled screens, the viewer is taken through one i lm after another, taking roughly an hour to experience all three.
David Lemm has translated his linear language into a series of screenprints which were initially conceived of during a residency on the Isle of Eigg. Lemm has printed over a series of found pages featuring outdated sea charts, whose age is revealed in small stains and damaged areas. Crisp, map-based interventions conl ict with these aged surfaces, but Lemm’s imagery is also deliberately out of date, with his old-fashioned map contours treated more as abstract, geometric lines, shapes and patterns resembling the language of early 20th-century abstraction than as instructive tools. Lemm invites viewers to consider the narrative potential in his semi-abstract language, but with 40 prints lined up so close together, it’s difi cult to absorb the images individually. That said, certain images do make their voices heard above the visual noise, such as ‘Box of Tricks’ and ‘Progress’, both of which use elements of darker tone to suggest the craggy and water-stained rock forms of Eigg.
Lemm’s animation, ‘Unborn Function’, brings more
energy: forms related to the genetic structure of Huntington’s disease move back and forth across the screen, resembling the graphic simplicity of a rudimentary computer game. (Rosie Lesso)
90 THE LIST 5 Feb–2 Apr 2015
They draw the senses through the observed lives Particular emphasis is placed on elements of
of its inhabitants and the space’s architecture. An unhurried but absorbing meditation on public-facing creative thinking and co-operative working in l awed action, it’s not so much political as existing within politics. The i lms present a potential alternative to prescribed institutional homogeneity. (David Pollock) disruption, breakage and failure, which the exhibition’s curators Kyla McDonald and Laura McLean-Ferris call ‘irksome moments’, such as tape skips, spelling mistakes, uni nished sentences or slurred speech. It reminds us of the all-too human qualities that exist within public i gures, which can easily be concealed behind the power of technology. (Rosie Lesso)