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These are not original art works; C printed art work JPG photos on A4 paper.
These images were sent by e-mail for this opening show from INGO DEE. Original works are printed on photo paper, and normaly bigger than A4 size. INGO DEE ; E-mail ingodee@graffiti.net |
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INGO DEE
Ingo Dee is an artist basically working with photography. In his series "SAFE AS...", he scanned images of a mail-order catalogue with survival equipment of the 1980ies and processed them electronically by the computer. The images, intercultural symbols for the basic needs of the human being like food, clothing, transportation, |
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| "Your language and your home always live within you" (1) "Today I believe in fact that the city is the only 'territory' that can 'give roots' and be in relation with the other, to host and be hosted at the same time. European history has mostly been a history of cities, of big cities 'on the move', always mobile, always in danger, but always capable of taking care of themselves. Freedom to cross borders has always been a part of the European spirit. Today, how can we speak of freedom? Surely not for the great streams of migrants. I doubt if we can even speak of freedom in terms of the great tourist floods drawn by the picturesque images of the tour operators. Once borders were crossed also by hospites, now, it seems, only by enemies or esuli (ex-solum - uprooted people)." Massimo Cacciari (2) In the fragmented and kaleidoscopically propelled domain of contemporary art, the globalised platform on which creative artists consort in action and creation, Ingo Duennebier methodically and persistently pursues a fresh new direction. An artist with the spirit of a nomad, an indefatigable traveller and trailblazer in the realm of photography and the audiovisual media, he has amassed a body of work that offers multi-dimensional approaches to the temporal, intellectual and sentimental fields of everyday or real-life experience, within and beyond the borders of his second country (he was born in Jena in 1959, lived and studied in Kassel from 1980-1982 and studied photography and audio-visual media in Cologne from 1982-1987, when he moved to Thessaloniki where he still lives and works). Today's superabundant plurality of more or less post-epigenous projects and universal visual arts interpretations (hyper-multiplication of shadows) creates an interactive intermeshing of reciprocating relations between artists, the social fabric of the cities, the points where translocations and transmutations converge with particular cultural, historical and social traditions into specific theoretical and philosophic concepts such as emigration, resettlement, nomadism, communication, cultural identity, corporeal morality, surveillance, survival, utopia in relation to reality and its virtual relocation, nature in relation to culture and the new technologies, the natural in relation to the artificial. In his new series "Safe as …", Ingo Duennebier moves between the paths of conflict and contradiction, through the profusion of heteroclite forms, actions and behaviours that reinforce the need for a redefinition of artistic identity directly defined by permuted individual and social parameters, to approach and through "familiarisation" and conceptual shifts (enlarging or reducing the size of the initial shape, colour changes, digital processing) to interpret given popular utilitarian symbols / survival gear in a variety of natural circumstances: travel, recreation, peregrination, camping, threatening weather conditions. These basic articles/tools (rucksack, blanket, torch, raincoat, knife, socks, tent), with their numerical classifications (taken from catalogues of camping and travel goods), are presented as motile and mutable architectural productions with linear units and links that, in primary endogenic structures, can constitute the basis for mobile, nomadic and continuously evolving "micro-topes". At this stage they are not utopian survival tools but real objective links suspended within intense fields of colour. The artist does not intervene in the initial form, which remains a viable part of the social reality of everyday life, connected with a variety of real experiences and situations. This work in progress with its continuing transformation offers a variety of new possibilities, translating the 'first' reality of the model into other 'spaces' that rely on digitalisation (transition from a physical and practical context with a utilitarian function) into a computer-generated work of art. The image space corresponds to a fictional architectural space while still remaining two-dimensional in its minimalist graphic rendering. These compositions, with their hypothetical (imagined) survival functions, have a catalytic action, connecting the human element with all areas of life and creation and with deconstructed aspects of reality. Nothing is "Safe as ...". Dr. Sania Papa Art Historian - Director of the Centre of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki February 2003 (1) Peter Coyne, Project for Tema Celeste 2000, digitally modified photograph No. 82, October-November 2000 (Cover) (2) Interview of Hans Ulrich Obrist with Massimo Cacciari, Catalogue of Manifesta 1, Rotterdam 1996 |