Showroom, Gallery Weekend Berlin, 2020
Emily Wardill, Night for Day, Secession, Vienna, until 8 November, 2020
Iman Issa, Surrogates, Kunstmuseum, Sankt Gallen, until 9 August, 2020
Cecilia Edefalk, Homecoming, Norrköppings Konstmuseum, until 17 January, 2021
Asta Gröting, Blinded and the best Light, 2020
video with sound, 5:56 min
For the next edition of SUNDAY OPEN, we will present a special screening of Asta Gröting's new work, Blinded and the best Light, 2020.
Asta Gröting’s single-channel video blinded and the best light begins with a dark screen. A slowly intensifying light illuminates the artist’s face gazing steadily, dispassionately at the camera until the glare washes out her visage, as if to obliterate her completely. What follows is a series of micro-choreographies of light and the face. Like the ebb and flow of a tide, Gröting emerges from the darkness only to retreat within it once again. In each reappearance her face is modulated by a different light source: a strobe, a laser pointer, a scanner, the atmospheric blue glare of an iPad. The prevalence of selfie-culture has certainly produced a glut of images staged, shot, and disseminated by subjects seeking to position themselves in the best light.
Yet Gröting’s video equally calls upon the cinematic close-up, which scholar Mary Ann Doane has described as “always, at some level, an autonomous entity, a fragment, a "for-itself." In her canonical text Doane notes that Walter Benjamin considered the close-up to be “one of the significant entrance points to the optical unconscious, making visible what in daily life went unseen.” Blinded and the best light seems to alternate between presenting the face as a variable surface and a locus of subjectivity—oscillating between subject and object. An abstract score bringing together psycho-acoustic, electromagnetic recordings of light and electricity amplifies the tension between interiority and exteriority that Asta Gröting’s spatially isolated body conveys. Grinding whirs and electric blips evoke an interior soundscape, as if hearing the sounds of your own body floating through the electromagnetic fields.
Asta Gröting, Blinded and the best Light, 2020
video with sound, 5:56 min
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Asta Gröting creates works that translate psychological and social relations into physical forms. She inverts the lexicon of monumental sculpture to draw our attention to absence and the physical and emotional gaps between people and things: whether lovers, family members, or historical figures.
Asta Gröting (b. 1961, Herford) lives and works in Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, Kleinplastik Triennale, Fellbach; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria; ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologien, Karlsruhe; n.b.k., Berlin; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and MARTa Herford. She has participated in numerous large-scale international exhibitions, including Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris, James-Simon-Galerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 22nd São Paulo Biennial, the 8th and 14th Biennale of Sydney, and the 44th Venice Biennale. Gröting is a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.