Rainer Strzolka

Dancer on the beach Rainer Strzolka

The present photographs were taken on June 4th of 2017 on the island of Föhr, when a young attractive woman practiced Irish dance there. The recordings were made on Kodak Ektachrome footage that expired in 1992. A Voigtländer Bessa L. modified as a pinhole camera was used. The images were shown on an installation on Hof Carlsen, Föhr Island, on February 12, 2020 for exactly one day. The exhibition catalog presented here confirms these photographs. Please visit us on the Internet atwww.galerie-fuer-kulturkommunikation.comRainer Strzolka (°1956, Berlin, Germany) makes photos and conceptual artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Strzolka absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation. His collected, altered and own photos are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. Rainer Strzolka currently lives and works in Leipzig.