HEIKE
BARANOWSKY

Time Traps, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2013

 

 

Heike Baranowsky employs the media of film, photography and video to explore time and space. She succeeds like few other contemporary artists in interlacing analysis and sensuality in such a way that our attention is captured and we are transported into a different time and a different place. Fascinating video loops occupy a tense position between stationary and moving image. While they represent seemingly reality, Baranowsky’s works play a subtle visual game of deception with our perceptions of time and space.
Although many works appear documentary at first glance, Baranowsky’s films and video installations later confute this impression, revealing their suggestive power through technical manipulations and thereby investigation the basic formal conditions of cinema.

Camera methods in themselves – such as frame selection, slow motion and zoom, repetition in the loop, mirroring in forward and backward mode, or tiny temporal shifts – develop into the structure of her works.
Baranowsky’s art does not tell long stories but focuses on a single image as a starting point, a moment or a place from which potential narratives may unfold, telling of the relations between occurrence, body, medium, space and time – and our relation to them.

 

The exhibition Time Traps at Kunsthalle Nürnberg gives the most comprehensive insight to date into Heike Baranowsky’s complex body of work, showing 15 representative works from the last 15 years. Fort he first time, this presentation sets individual, internationally well-known works such as PASSAGE I (Schiff), 1998, or Schwimmerin (1:24), 2000, into the overall context oft the artist’s consistent work. (Ellen Seifermann)