2014 - 15
The things surrounding us are subtly talking to us. Their pure presence creates an auratic influence on us. The existence of things in human society documents social development as well as personal conditions.
I picked some of them in order to catch the characteristics in a drawing. In my very personal selection I was lead by free association and connection with these items. Although photography would have been stronger in detail, for me it was more accurate to explore these things the way I did. By doing so I could shortly save them from endless stream of decay and forgetting. In this process they became a sort of private encyclopedia of things.
Interesting thoughts to the topic of ”transmission“ I found in the book Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit (Suhrkamp 2014) by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. There he examines history and progress of western postrevolutionary society where continuity of transition from one generation to the other has faded at the beginning of 21st century. In his opinion the individuum of modern society is left to a supposed freedom while society is uncontrollably ”falling“ forward. He discribes the sources and the impact of a uncertainty of origin for a society whose inhabitants he called ”new bastards“. They act in flat organised systems that constanly change, sending and receiving at the same time. Here a ”heritage“ seems to be less attractive and static.
Other parallel thoughts according to the project I dicovered in a collection of still actual essays called Mythologies – Mythen des Alltags written 1957 by French philosopher Roland Barthes. He examined the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looked at the semiology of the process of myth creation concluding that every object, idea, picture or text could become a myth.
The collection of almost fifty res narrandi is telling historical stories of a generation, but also very personal ones of where I was and what I found on my way. Thus a miniature golf ticket stands equal beside a Leica camera, a basketball tricot or a Churchill drinking cup.
Isabella Til
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FELIX RINGEL GALERIE
Duesseldorf
ISABELLA TIL
res narrandi
12 January - 27 February 2016
res narrandi, charcoal, colour pencil and pencil on paper, 29,7 x 42 cm (choice from fifty works)
