Galerie Kamm Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 43/45 10178 Berlin Allemagne
Annette Kisling photographs unintelligible things with utmost lucidity. In her current b/w series,
"les vitrines", these are the shop windows of the early 21st century, embedded in the bourgeois facades of Paris's inner boroughs-commodity stages arranged for optimal visibility. In Annette Kisling's work, however, their purpose is lost. Here the gaze expands to capture both the interior and the exterior, that which lies behind the windowpane and that which it mirrors: cars, trees, sky, building facades, street alignments. Everything stands side-by-side and simultaneously permeates everything else. This is necessarily so, yet the principle underlying this order is difficult to name.
Annette Kisling calls this principle "layering", and by this she refers also to an intertwining of history and the present. Here, the historical building fronts are also simply a facade. Paris, unmistakably the capital of the 19th Century, serves as a scenic backdrop to the present.
All of this gathers in the panes of the window displays, peculiar things themselves in that they evade the very tactile contact they surrender to the gaze. Kisling stages the shop windows as "interfaces", emphasizing the divisionary just as much as the conjunctive: the mirrored exterior world impedes the view upon the spread of opulent goods, and instead offers the greater abundance of the entire city. Yet this abundance, a mere reflection suspended in the two-dimensionality of the windowpane, remains immaterial, as intangible as the rugs, paintings and furniture secured behind the glass. In this way, Kisling's "vitrines" also reflect upon photography itself, which rearranges things into a new order, allowing us to see more and apprehend less.
Henrik Ghanaat