foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images)

Somewhere a curtain.
Motionless in its representation.
Captured in its own immobility.

The curtain, functionless, is just the décor for a model to be entered.
Smothering every tone and stifling all images that come and go.

(from Dominique Hurth: language in the darkness of the world through inverse images, 2012, p. 158)

In foreword (language in the darkness of the world through inverse images), Dominique Hurth created a model for an exhibition in which images and their captions flicker and resist in an attempt at retinal persistence. Subjective readings and authorship merged into a display that interlaced both visual and textual information, static and moving instances in a strobe effect, a flipping through the pages of a written foreword for a dream book of history. Her research on the physical manifestation of a book, collective readings and séances formed a backdrop—a background color—for an oscillatory movement in which images vacillated between their endless (written) imprints.

The title of the exhibition referred both to Hurth’s artist book (2012) and the structure and writing of a foreword in the format of an exhibition. Here, and in research during her stay at Büchsenhausen, she questioned authorship, images, captions, the flipping of pages and images, the framing of each one (in terms of space, geography and language) and the imagery (and gaps) of one’s own personal memory. She quoted exhibition history and early collective reading séances while interlacing images with an infinite loop of captions that can be attached subjectively.

One particular object of investigation was a curtain that existed both in the infrastructure of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, in Hurth’s installation, and as an echo in the group exhibition Collectivity Matters at the Kunstpavillon. By echoing it, repeating it and so repositioning it, Dominique Hurth investigated the haptical manifestation of an object that functions as a filter, backdrop, division and partition or as an element of décor that is about to open, hide or simulate. She reflected on the feel and opacity of the folds as her own punctuation with which to enter a model of thought; the curtain becoming a backdrop to the viewer’s own staging, entering the exhibition as a model for a set in which each and every move influences the trajectory of the narration.
(Text source: Dominique Hurth)