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Wiebke Elzel

Sunday, June 26 - Saturday, July 2

Künstlerische und politische Aussagekraft

Wiebke Elzel (born 1977 in Hanover, lives and works in Cologne and Berlin) keeps notebooks, collects quotes, and composes texts that are part fiction, part documentary. Here, she tells the story of how she purchased a mirror when a hotel that was closing down sold off its furniture. Now, the mirror hangs in her apartment, adorned with a postcard of William Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1810–1812), in which the commander-in-chief is nowhere to be seen, only his followers, at the mercy of the blizzard. This reveals the key themes of Elzel’s artistic thinking: cultural history and its artifacts as traces that continue to exert their effects to the present day; reflection (on multiple levels); and the consequences of political events for the individual. Wiebke Elzel’s current works also pose very basic questions regarding the relationship between art and world history. The series Sunday, June 26 – Saturday, July 2 references seven issues of the International New York Times, which provided the original material for the multiple-part photographic piece. Once again, Elzel painstakingly dissects headlines into fragments and single letters, which she then rearranges to form a seemingly random image.

With a text by Barbara Josepha Scheuermann.