Nachbau

2007 - Photography (Photography)

72.8 x 64.8 x 4.5 cm

Simon Starling

location: Copenhagen, Denmark
year born: 1967
gender: male
nationality: British
home town: Epsom, United Kingdom

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis. Starling found photographs of a hang dating back to 1929, taken by Albert Renger-Patzsch, the German New Objectivity photographer. Firstly, he researched the artworks that were presented then which for the most part had been restituted or acquired by private collectors after the war. Secondly, he reconstituted this hang. Finally, he took the same pictures as Renger-Patzsch, with the same ‘scientific objectivity’. The result is simple and minimal, and tends to erase any difference with the original. Playing on the notion of author, Starling identically reconstructs (‘Nachbau’ means reconstruction in German), thus he realizes an exact replica of the photographs taken seventy years earlier. By blurring temporalities, the artist manipulates the history of the collections and questions the outcome of the images and the institution in light of this actual reconstruction in the museum. This work can also be understood as an absurd attempt to go back in time in order to correct history.


Simon Starling provokes unexpected crossings between objects, materials and events. He produces hybrid works that seem to come from another space-time continuum. In 1995, he used the aluminium from a chair designed by Jorge Pensi to reproduce nine copies of a beer can found on the Bauhaus site in Dessau, thus creating a condensed history of design in a rather trivial object, turning a piece of rubbish found by chance into the clue of a historical lineage neither absurd nor authentic. While avoiding formal creation ex nihilo, the artist paradoxically behaves like a true demiurge. His works imply processes of metamorphosis quite similar to alchemy. He appropriates forms and objects and integrates them into complex networks of meaning which do not aim at revealing a hidden history but rather at drawing unseen paths that ultimately exist only because of his intervention. Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, UK. He lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Karachi Series 1 (Chandra Acarya, 7:50pm, 30 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi)
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2008

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...

Death at a 30 Degree Angle
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2012

The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...

Line describing a cone
© » KADIST

Anthony McCall

1973

The film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year...

let this be us
© » KADIST

Richard T. Walker

2012

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T...

Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2008

The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...

Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1)
© » KADIST

Cerith Wyn Evans

2008

Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...

One we are not
© » KADIST

Ryan Gander

2004

Ryan Gander is a collector...

¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, 1 (columna alfarero)
© » KADIST

Mariana Castillo Deball

2015

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...

Sundown (Number Twenty)
© » KADIST

Xaviera Simmons

2019

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances...

Untitled (TIME)
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2010

In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...

Espadrilles
© » KADIST

Rosalind Nashashibi

2019

Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations...

Days of Our Lives: Reading
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2009

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...

I Want to be Gentleman
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2000

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations...

Re: Looking
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2004

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...

Mimbres pottery kill hole sequence
© » KADIST

Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion)
© » KADIST

Adrian Wong

2012

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...

Condition Report
© » KADIST

Glenn Ligon

2000

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...

Masks (Merkel F6.1)
© » KADIST

Simon Fujiwara

2016

Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...

Plug the well ( July / August 2003)
© » KADIST

Keith Tyson

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...