On A Clear Day, One Can See Forever is a result of a six-week interaction Annika Hippler, Ingo Gerken and Lior Gal had with the city of Kolkata on various levels. Coming from an entirely different cultural context and artistic practices, the artists try to create a certain kind of vision of the city and its profound social and cultural elements. Engaging with various materials ranging from everyday objects, books and found objects in the streets, the exhibition creates a new sense of imagination and possibilities for open dialogues.
Annika Hippler's minimalistic and poetic works deal with questions about the nature of light, space and motion. In her multi-dimensional works, she translates waves, vibrations and oscillations into analogue photograms, site-specific installations and light objects. During the residency, she closely examined the works of the renowned scientist J. C. Bose, especially his experiments on the patterns of reactions to external influences of the Mimosa (touch-me-not plant) and Telegraph plant (dancing plant). Hippler transfers these interactions in her work through a unique visual language.
Ingo Gerken interacts with selected books, catalogues and magazines from the rich assortment of Emami Art Library. Adding everyday items from Kolkata marketplaces makes the art book a thoughtfully open terrain for subtle shifts in meaning and poetic expansion. Gerken’s interventions enter into multi-layered interactions with depicted works and institutional contexts, exploring the balance of power and representation between the so-called eastern and western cultures. Furthermore, the artist shows sculptures made of found objects in the streets. These sculptures often happen by coincidence and in positive awareness of the potential of mistakes, wrong handling, and misunderstanding. Without losing the tracks of their original purpose, the objects change their orientation towards another state of being.
Lior Gal’s work rearranges our prior knowledge about the relationship between land art and action-in-and-on the landscape. Predominantly, his work stems from traversals ̶ long walks in arid places, during which left or found imprints in the landscape are photographed in black & white. Gal pastes the photographic landscapes to create a hybridised appearance of welded times, places, perspectives and situations. The picture is further sophisticated when a thread is being coiled around the welded photographic appearance, it allows Gal to dislocate the travel experience into the interior architectural space without losing its magnitude. It brings to mind the Hindu ritual of Puja. Coiling the threads not only recalls existing religious rituals, it also amounts to a ritual of its own, a form of evocation which exploits the evocative power already imbued in Gal’s initial traversals.
Short bios
Annika Hippler
Born in 1978 in Berlin, Annika Hippler studied at the Berlin University of Arts and the Braunschweig University of Art. Hippler extensively works with ideas of science and astrophysics, the universal perception of space and the transfer of scientific knowledge into light through an artistic language. She works with laser beams to produce hypnotic spatial and visual compositions by examining the painterly qualities of light frequency and wavelength. Her works have been shown in numerous institutions, galleries and museums. She has received various stipends and participated in residency programs in Germany, Austria, Russia, Czech Republic, India and Tunisia.
Ingo Gerken
Born in 1971 in Lippetal, Germany, Ingo Gerken studied Fine Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art in Kiel, Germany, and Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Gerken works on varying ideas ranging from architecture, space, books and site-specific materials. His recent solo shows include Daniel Marzona Gallery, Berlin (2022); Kunstverein Ingolstadt, Germany (2022); Mezzaterra Gallery, Belluno, Italy (2021); Galerie Oel-Früh, Hamburg (2020); European Month of Photography, Berlin (2020). He has been a part of group shows, such as One Minute Space, Athens, Greece (2022); Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Germany (2021); Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Brussels, Belgium (2021); Tuscan Art Center, Siena, Italy (2020).
Lior Gal
Born in 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Lior Gal's practice combines photography, installations and fieldwork, amounting to photographic objects in architectural spaces and site-specific interventions in open, outdoor locations. Gal's work has been shown extensively in Belgium, France, and other countries in Western Europe and America. He lives in Brussels.