Exhibition
Film | Photo | Mixed media installation | VR
8 works exploring the tension between moving images and stills

When I asked my mother what I was like as a child, she answered quickly. I was easy to keep occupied; all you had to do was sit me down somewhere and I would spend a long time observing my surroundings closely. This perception of the world has been a constant throughout my life and my artistic work ever since, and continues to this day.

Manfred Neuwirth

‘To want to systematise popular belief itself,’ writes Heinrich Heine in his Elementargeister, is as futile ‘as trying to frame passing clouds’. At most, similar things can be brought together. This idea forms a resonant backdrop for Space of the Gaze – an exhibition that sees itself less as a closed narrative than as a loose arrangement of gazes, traces and pictorial spaces. But what kind of viewing space is this? Certainly not a uniform or linear one. It is not a container, but a movement: a structure of eight works that unfold different perspectives. Observing, lingering, ordering, collecting, allowing to reappear.

A space that opens up less through walls than through time, rhythm and media settings. Neuwirth works systematically without asserting a system. What Walter Benjamin described as constellation and Ludwig Wittgenstein as family resemblance appears here as an open order of seeing: loosely connected, non-hierarchical, without a centre. Archiving does not become a means of appropriating reality, but rather a method of careful arrangement. Order here is not an instrument of domination, but rather a practice of attention – and perhaps also a form of courtesy towards the material.

The self articulates itself in these works only medially as a trace. Analytical, partly technicised procedures encounter a very personal, contemplative gaze. Authorship remains perceptible without imposing itself. Individual perspectives organise themselves away from a centre, yet as part of a transindividual reality. In our media-saturated present, in which images often circulate faster than experience can settle, this attitude seems almost stubbornly calm: it does not confuse access with insight. The absence of the sensational is characteristic. Neuwirth's works promise no miracles; they guarantee nothing. Fulfilled reality – if it occurs – remains bound to the viewer's willingness to engage. His pictorial compositions maintain the tension between access and non-correspondence; grasping occurs in the awareness of its limits. It is precisely here that lies an artistic quality that has become rare today: the gesture of invitation.

Whether the gaze in Krido Sky lingers on the sky for a long time – inefficient, resting, almost stubborn – or, as in Vom Vater bleibt nur mehr der Rest auf dem Bild, memory is organised as a medial constellation: it is always about pictorial spaces that do not seek to represent, but to evoke. Here, becoming an image always means also telling the story of absence. Clouds are not representable objects, but processes – their traces become visible. The surroundings are rarely shown directly, but always composed into the picture; what is missing remains present.

The cloud in particular is suitable as a secret guide: often staged in painting as a mood carrier, here it appears as materiality, as an archival unit of moisture, particles and gases. Clouds cannot be contained, mapped or captured. They ignore political boundaries just as the sea does. What is permitted in one country and prohibited in another is carried on atmospherically. Thus, a non-anthropomorphic horizon opens up in its political dimensions without having to be formulated. History appears as a space of presence and absence, as a ghostly trace. Even a stone, even an image, even a glance are culturally produced. Space of the Gaze does not open up a space of overview, but one of complicity: an engagement with fleeting image spaces, with microscopic narratives, with casual shifts in which something suddenly appears.

Perhaps this is also where the quiet humour of this exhibition lies: in the knowledge that miracles cannot be forced. The gaze remains alert, patient, a little hunter-like. And prefers to wait rather than claim that it has already seen everything.

Francesca Romana Audretsch