Wolfgang Plöger: I did not know anybody was there

On Friday, November 16th, from 6 to 9 pm the Konrad Fischer Gallery will open the first solo exhibition of the Berlin based artist Wolfgang Plöger.

The exhibition will present four groups of work which deal with the dialectics of presence and absence and question the relationship betweeen text and image based information.

The latter is the case in Ploeger's ongoing project Google Image Search which he has been working on since 2003. In this series the activity of the artist is limited to the input of a term into common internet search engines and the documention of the immense number of images which result from this simple act. Without any comment or change of order the images are printed and bound in linen covered books. In Death Row for example, we find 1000 pictures of different Death Row candidates and their surroundings.

The film installation Last Statements continues this theme by quoting the last words of prisoners sentenced to death. But the relationship between text and image appears to be shifted here as the quotes are written on the actual celuloid which due to the lack of the projector´s take up reels, are constantly moving on the floor defining an empty space. The text is readable only on the floor and it becomes a kind of abstract calligraphy as soon as it reaches the speedy sprockets of the projector and is projected onto the wall.

Ploeger's Boxes for Shadows could come out of a novel by Cervantes. As in Last Statements these works deal with - but in a far more abstract way - the ascertainment of elusive phenomenons which defy permanent perceptibility. The form and size of the boxes follow actual shadows and in their strange indexicality they seem like photographs which have turned into objects preserving a moment as pure form.

The film installations Oscillating Space and Tumbling Walls focus on deserted spaces and seem to offer not much more than the images from security cameras. The animated film Oscillating Space plays with the conventions of the genre. While the illusion of movement is usually created by changing the position of things or persons little by little within a ‚frozen' space, here, the space itself becomes the variable and begins to slightly swing in front of our eyes.

Tumbling Walls functions in a similar way but here Plöger does not use a large number of drawings as the source of the film but rather a rectangle on his studio wall painted black. By increasing and diminishing the size of the rectangle at its edges, a little bit for each frame, it appears as a protruding and recoiling wall when projected. Three of these films are projected in an arrangement on one wall using a different color for each projection. The work can thus be understood as a kind of kinetic-cinematographical abstraction.

Wolfgang Plöger
I did not know anybody was there.