Renate Buser: TOKYO
Renate Buser's work could be described as a hybrid between photography, stage design and film. Whether she "animates" architecture via photographs that have been installed at an 45° angle to each other, or creates impossible spatial concurrency with analogically manipulated images: for Buser, photography is not merely a copy of reality, but an extended field of experimentation - an ongoing attempt to translate a two-dimensional medium into a three-dimen-sional and time-involving dimension.
The new works on view at Galerie Gisèle Linder emerged from a four-week-long residency in Tokyo. Maybe the term "emerged" isn't accurate here, as Buser's photography is always the product of a long-term and literally multilayered process, which, after taking pictures on site,
is continued in the studio. The artist, who had been working with architecture, facades, and the possibilities of their perspective transformation for many years, was inspired by the cinematic qualities of Tokyo. Urban utopias, like those familiar from movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, encountered her in Tokyo in reality. The co-existence of hyper-modern architecture and the historical quarters with their narrowly nested alleys and gaps, built the starting point for the conception of the exhibition TOKYO.
Like a location-scout, Buser took pictures of streets, places and buildings reminiscent to film scenes, in order to re-use them for her own staging. The shooting on site already contains a temporal dimension. The pictures were taken in black-and-white with a large-scale camera and long exposure times, to preserve a maximum of detail-density. Elusive, narrative moments were captured with the video camera in color. In the post-production process, Buser populates her stills with living props, which move around "live" in the photographic backdrops. The way this is done may appear absurdly archaic in times of photoshop and the various possibilities of digital image editing. But it's exactly this unveiled analog, and to a certain degree uncontrollable "crafted-ness", which interests Renate Buser. After the black-and-white photograph has been blown up to over-life size dimensions, it is adopted to the dimensions of the room, so that the horizontal level (sort of flipped down in the flat image), runs parallel to the floor again. Living animals and people act now in the photograph - thus transformed into a stage: a monstrous rat poses in front of Tokyo's famous fish market, and a raven sits on a power pole in a narrow alley - in fact, it's a rod installed in front of the photograph, matching the cables behind in perfect disguise. These tableaux-vivants have then again been photographed, this time in color, which highlights the alienated figure-ground-relationship. Buser doesn't cheat in her montages: the process, even if on second glances, remains transparent. Sometimes, the real space appears behind the photograph, or the fixtures or the image planes are visible. Also the slightly shifted proportions evoke surreal moments and demand for
a closer inspection.
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