New Catalogue

An extensive catalogue on the works of Susanne Weirich has just been published by Kehrer Verlag under the title "searchviews". The large-format publication gives a good insight into the complete works of this media and installation artist whose work repeatedly questions the principles by which realities are constructed. Weirich is an artist who looks particularly closely at structural principles. In a perceptive and cleverly conceived work process, she deconstructs reality to recombine the resulting fragments into new unities in the artwork. Hence, a "computer game" and its structural characteristics become "six live-action films". In the fortunetelling machine, the principle of "divination" becomes a vast projection machinery that allows the motifs of tarot cards to appear in the darkened space like heavenly beams. In "Elle ne perd pas le nord", the Baroque "map of feelings" from absolutist France becomes a screen for sentences of projected light, one that both materialises and at the same time and in the same process questions and dismantles the "constructedness" of worldviews and their conventionalised regimes.

Whoever, as viewer, also sees in these works (as well as others such as "Taking Notes", where Post-It notes can become the origin of decisive turns of fate) the system of an "experimental setup", is surely not far off track. Just as the particle physicist, through cleverly devised experiments, indirectly makes visible the rules of particle interaction, the artworks of Susanne Weirich give shape to a grammar for the construction of realities. Not unlike the rules of a game that are binding for everybody but which, according to the dexterity of the player, can be put to use in different ways. Each move is determined by the well-known paradox of being simultaneously free and restrained - predictable only in general terms, never regarding the end result. Besides being for the most part aesthetically very attractive, Weirich's works also draw the viewer's attention to "switch points" at which "alternative routes" might, but needn't always appear. She manages to fill the "dry", the "grammatical" with "life", and yet each viewer will simultaneously - perhaps even with a certain trepidation - mentally add the substantial, the objectively visible to such works, and then in large part also track down the decision-determining and binding aspects of the structures and their strict parameters. Perhaps this is even one of the essential stylistic features shared by all the works in this catalogue. Weirich manages to translate the abstract into a visible, perceptible and generative form without concealing the dominant, controlling, sometimes even demonic aspects.

Editor: Ernest W. Uthemann / Authors: Doris Kolesch, Doris von Drathen, Ernest W. Uthemann, Georg Stanitzek, Karin Bruns, Knut Ebeling. The catalogue is published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg and can be obtained from booksellers.

Soft cover, 23.5 x 29.5 cm, 112 pages, 77 colour plates + audio CD, ISBN 978-3-86828-012-8, price: €19.80.

Heinz Kock