Pirating Presence

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The exhibition project Pirating Presence presents seven artistic positions on complex questions of image appropriation and transformation. The presentation is part of an exhibition series developed by Margret Eicher, Adi Hoesle, Isabel Kerkermeier, Stefan Römer, Heidi Sill, Susanne Wehr and Toni Wirthmüller and realised from varying perspectives in six different art associations and museums in 2018 and 2019. In the context of this series, the exhibition at Galerie Nord focuses on the arousal of desires, the craving for images and the strategies of deception that are not infrequently inherent in them.

Isabel Kerkermeier, for example, layers used advertising tarpaulins and uses the materialisation of the digital image through detachment and fraying in an almost sculptural way to generate areas of transparency and concealment. Toni Wirthmüller detaches worn garments from their original context and performs an appropriation through sampling with coloured frames, fragmentation and montage of photographic quotations. Susanne Wehr, on the other hand, bases her photographic works on the unmanageable archives of the internet, asks about the possibilities of classification and evaluation and explores the field of image desire and deception. For Margret Eicher, art historical models are the source material. She combines jacquard tapestries and motifs from glossy magazines as digital collages. Here glamour meets melancholy and isolation meets desire. In her works, Heidi Sill deals with projection surfaces of the body, with ideals of beauty and vanitas. Her textile installation creates a stage that both stages and veils and thus plays with desire. Adi Hoesle is an artist who works at the intersection of art, technology and the human sciences. His digital transformation of a Gerhard Richter painting oscillates between appropriation and deception. Questions of appropriation are also central to the works of Stefan Römer, but here on a theoretical level. With his painting “The Fake Rag”, he laconically lists international terms that address desire and deception.

All the artists represented in the exhibition sample, deconstruct or redefine what they have found; they simultaneously receive and produce by analysing and transforming the source material. In this way, the works in the exhibition raise questions about the meaning of images in an irritating way.

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