Installation in Bergen art society
The woven expression - Aage Langhelle´s woven pictures and objects
Icelandic Moss
Icelandic moss (Centraria islandica) grows in scattered or dense patches on heathland
or in mountain areas and in "acidic" forest areas in Northern and Middle Europe. This moss belongs to one of the few species of lichen with a German name. Most of the lichens only have Latin names. Why is the plant called moss when it´s really a species of lichen?
Moss and lichen (flechten)
In herbal books up to the mid-nineteenth century, lichen was considered a species of moss. 
The word flechten first turned up in connection with hairdressing - plaited hair. Later it came into use as a plant name. And finally it was used to describe an illness or rash.
Fungi and algae
The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener (1829-1919) established in 1869 that lichen 
consists of two independent living organisms, fungi and algae. This symbiosis enables them to grow in places they would not have made it on their own. In this way they can survive even in the most extreme biotopes.
Lichen (flechten) and photographs
We know that the fungus in lichen draws organic nutrients from the algae, but it is uncertain whether the algae get water or salts from the fungus in return. Aage Langhelles´s interwoven pictures and objects are a symbiotic connection between object and picture. They do not unite picture and object, but the symbiosis of two different photographs results in a picture-object or object-picture. These consist of two photos which are both cut in long, narrow, parallel strips and then woven together. 
Their distinct identities are not manifested in the material, but in the motif: heads of living and dead people, walls of houses, building sites, scaffolding. Decay, reconstruction, building and restoration. Human decomposition can be delayed by means of a preservative. Result: a shrivelled head, a mumie. Into this decelerated decay Aage Langhelle weaves a building site, a skeleton of a body that is still being built. A photograph also mumifies the object as a reproduction. Long after the motif has been laid to rest in its grave, the photographic paper turns yellow of its own accord. Is skin the basis for make-up? Or is it the skull? In Langhelle´s interwoven pictures and objects, opposites flow together in a mould. Inside becomes outside, outside becomes inside, above and below, behind and in front, past and future, construction and deconstruction. Divided into uniform squares, space collapses, time, and thereby also the certainty by which the observer could have got his bearings.
Inside and outside
Where in the lichen can one find the fungus and where are the algae? In Aage Langhelle´s object-pictures the motifs are combined in such a way that it is hard to distinguish the basic substance. The amalgamation of the motifs does not lead to their mystification, but rather to them drifting into the unfamiliar. The result of this construction is on the one hand a very open, free and multi-interpretive form. On the other hand a strict, fixed set of rules, which doesnÕt provide the observer with a way out. He must find his own.
Weaving is a laborious and time-consuming occupation. Basket-weaving is an ancient craft which today has few practitioners. 
In the Berlin Blindenanstalt´s workshop, one can still buy woven household articles that have been made by blind workers. They make among other things brushes and brooms out of horsehair and sisal. A brush also turns up in one of Langhelle´s installations. A brush with a coating of skin where you grip it, a photo of a skin surface where you grasp the wood.
The expression brought to conciousness
What is visible in the woven pictures and objects is always the external features, the skulls, the protective wrapping that corresponds with their antithesis: the naked inner being, the skeleton, the scaffolding, the brain, i.e. everything that the layers cover up. This connection is expressed in invisible picture strips, invisible because they are hidden, nevertheless they can be reconstructed on the basis of the information they contain.
In their indeterminability, in their multi-level flicker, the eyes are no longer in the front. They are no longer instruments of vision, but look ahead through the hair on the back of the head, into oneself and through oneself.
Wolfgang Müller
Review in Bergens Tidende as PDF
Wolfgang Müller Wolfgang Müller (born 1957 in Wolfsburg) is an artist, musician and writer. He was a member of the band Die Tödliche Doris (80-87). Müller has participated in a number of exhibitions at home and abroad; amongst others at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Dokumenta 8, Kassel (framework performance). Educated at Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. In 2001 Müller was visiting professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. Lives in Berlin.
Installation in UKS Gallery
Order and unease
In the renaissance, a grid was used as an aid for accurately replicating a motif. The artist looked through a grid to help him measure precisely the distance between different points in a picture. Aage Langhelle´s most orderly woven pictures demonstrate a similar rigidity; even so, they deviate from it in that not one, but two motifs are chopped into squares, blended together and are thereby fragmented. The grid serves the purpose of spreading the photographic motif over the surface as well as acting as a starting point for disrupting the photograph´s referentiality. In this process there is room for both rigid adherence to structure (weaving without sidestepping) and for playing imaginative games with the weaving technique. Langhelle does not approach the photographic material with deference, but rather uses it as a starting point for experimenting with visual perception, and in the extention of this, for contemplation of the photograph as a medium.
The woven pictures are made up of photographs cut up into strips then woven together. Two motifs can be interwoven quite mechanically: one up, one down until both pictures are filtered into each other in a regular pattern across the whole surface. The cutout windows that emerge of the individual motif lie flickering on the borderline between the referential and the concrete/abstract - the eye searches for a motif, but the grainy disruption of the motif into squares hampers the unproblematic connection to a reference. The two motifs compete for attention. One can decide to see the one, or the other. A portrait, for instance, or a building site.
In other pictures Langhelle departs from a systematic approach in favour of a more random order. Playing with the ornamental takes the upper hand, and the motifs are broken up into strips and squares. In contrast to the more mechanically woven pictures, it seems here that aesthetic considerations have played a part as the weaving proceeds, as if to achieve particular visual effects. A moulding force, individual elements become visible when specific patterns emerge, rythm and decoration seem to have been consciously shaped. The effect of depth in the ornamentation, the repetitions of colour and a certain way of doing it - a knack - are more reminiscent of manual weaving techniques rather than the grid as a visual measuring tool.
The visual confusion that is brought about by the pictures is similar to what happens when we think about an incident that took place some time back. The intensity, the need to remember exactly what happened, makes the memory fade. The details slip out of our grasp. In the end we donÕt know whether what we remember really happened, or whether we made it up. The very act of recall adds so many alterations to the incident that it is hardly the same event any longer. Our impression of the past cannot escape being affected by a moulding force, trying to fit the incidents into certain structures. The image we recall is both detracted from and added to in the process of recollection.
Langhelle unites two extremes when he transforms the photographs into an interwoven grid pattern, a sectioning that stands in contrast to everything a photograph is considered to be. According to Rosalind Krauss the grid mesh is non-narrative: it acts as a self-sufficient, aesthetic set of rules and relates only to itself. The photograph, on the other hand, is by definition referential, in that it always incorporates traces of what was in front of the lens at the moment of exposure. It invites us to engage in just the kind of thought processes that the grid does not encourage. Both narrative and metaphor, sequential study and the referential, are set in motion. In the interwoven pictures there is in a kind of way a crossover of these two opposites: of the grid mesh as autonymous and non-referential, and the photograph as narrative and referential. The mesh begins to refer to itself as a shaping force, and the photograph disintegrates as a reference.
A photograph is always an image of the past; the moment of exposure is back in time, and looking at a photograph therefore always means looking at a bygone visual impression. When the photographic image here is exposed to?? various structural forces, it no longer has an external reference, it refers just as much to itself as an aesthetic or material object. One picture overlaps or is combined with another; it is subjected to manipulation and alteration. By working with it the motif disintegrates as an object, it is not presented as anything which seems to be whole or real.
A similar combination and transgression of opposites in one and the same picture can be seen in a series of photographs of plants. Here the systematic approach is already in place as the picture of the motif is taken: the plants are set in the ground in some kind of system; the theme is groups of plants in gardens and flower beds at different spots in the city. The similarity with the interwoven pictures can be found in that here, too, there is a certain order that has been imposed on something that already exists - in this case not on a motif, but on an organism. And again it is up to the observer to choose his focus - to see the system, or deviation from the system. Movement is created between the systematic and the individual motif/organism.
The distinction between what is a system and what is the difference from order, is not always easy to determine. The plants themselves are cultivated, and they adhere just as much to their inherent predetermined plan as to the planting grid imposed upon them. We are dealing here with structures on several levels and of varying sizes that mutually comment on and compete with one another.
The woven pictures can be perceived as playing games with and contemplation of the grid mesh´s potential - visually in the way the pictures combine, are distorted and interact. Games are also played with the three-dimensional modelling. The expression changes from a woven surface to a woven tube or folded pleat. The pictures assume the nature of an object, they become three-dimensional objects, things. At exhibitions they are often displayed in a group: woven pictures rest on a shelf, not fixed to the wall, and other objects are often displayed alongside them. There are objects with a thematic hint, such as cowboy romanticism, boyish dreams, horses, a touch of homosexuality - eroticism. There may be personal objects like a dressing gown, a clothes brush, pictures of body parts. The woven pictures are lifted out of a purely introverted artistic discourse (referentiality versus grid mesh) into a more private, autbiographical or personally related story. Focus dissolves and is scattered into the fragmentary, associative.
A similar fragmentation can be experienced when constantly changing the angle of approach, the work method, and migration between forms of presentation, which Langhelle insists upon both while work is in progress and when exhibiting the completed works. The most systematic, finely meshed photographs i n particular could be perfectly suited to a monumental staging; they incorporate both a strict order that emits authority, and they limit themselves to a narrowly defined technical area. But instead of holding on to this, they pull away. The pictures are likely to be casually displayed on a shelf, the hand-weaving is too irregular to meet minimalistic requirements, and the number of pieces moves the centre of gravity from one work to an associative series, to transfers and constant testing. One idea generates the next, and instead of marking out an area that is Langhelle by signature, the scene is always in flux. Rather than settling in one place, the pictures indicate ways to move forward.
As an anti-monumental work, or work in progress, the pieces can both irritate and fascinate. Irritate because they donÕt fulfil the need for open-and shut answers, they donÕt provide an indisputable truth; fascinate because they always allow for another possibility, a new connection. Simple opposites are succeeded by multiple potential correlations.
Ingvill Henmo is an art critic and editor of the Norwegian art journal Billedkunst. She is educated as an artist and literary critic.
Review in Drammens Tidende as PDF
(con)temporary South Africa
I took part in a residency program at The Bag Factory (affiliated to the Triangle Arts Trust) in Johannesburg for three months. A part of the time I was teaching photography at the Funda College of Art in Soweto. Most of the pictures were taken during projects with the students.
(Con)temporary is a combination of temporary and coeval. It refers to different parts of my rather short stay and my photo project. My focus was hawkers and spaza shops.
Aage Langhelle - From a post-colonial point of view
Perception is a complex process, not only in a physiological, but also in a political sense. In the age of post-colonialism the conditions of perception become even more complex. Here and now it becomes clear that such a thing as an innocent view does not exist any more. However, the search for the view of the guilty cannot result 
in a simple answer either, for the post-colonial view includes the colonized as much as the colonizer. In sum, one could say there are four different perspectives: the colonizer's view of the colonized and vice versa, as well as each one's perception of him/herself. But anyone describing these perspectives will face a further problem, as the perception itself is also perceived. Aage Langhelle's work for the exhibition "rest in space” is a presentation of these conditions. The artist spent three months taking photographs in South Africa. As a white tourist he was immediately recognized as a foreigner whose camera was also regarded a threat. Aage Langhelle compensates this ‘photographic assault' by presenting the photos in the frame of an installation. This installation is the reconstruction of an improvised market stall as they are to be found in many parts of Johannesburg. They serve to make a living for the South Africans who, after the end of apartheid, still live in poverty. The reconstruction of these shacks is not presented as an imitation, but as a kind of image which again includes further images - the mentioned photographs. The wooden beams that are used still show the price tags and look fresh and new. This is not a faithful reconstruction, as the very title of the work, ‘(con)temporary', shows, because contemporary becomes temporary, and thus opposes any claim for conservation. The temporary aspect of photography is identical with the temporary aspect of the installation, which furthermore refers to the temporary spazashops in South Africa. At the same time the construction of the space, of the installation, refers to the photographs' conceptual construction. For the view is not innocent, but Aage Langhelle adds notes to the pictures which explain and clarify the situation. Perception in the pictures meets with perception in the texts and is furthermore in dialogue with the perception of a reconstruction. Thus the view is refracted in itself and becomes reflected in a double meaning.
From a post-colonial point of view we may also learn that things are not as easy as they are presented in the media. George Monbiot writes about Robert Mugabe in Süddeutsche Zeitung: ”The governments of the rich world do not like land-reforms. Because they require an intervention of the state which offends the god of the free market, and bother the big farmers as well as the companies they are supplying. Only because Britain refused to allow or finance an appropriate program of reform in Zimbabwe, political circumstances developed, which Mugabe is now so unscrupulously taking advantage of. The 'Lancaster House Agreement‘ transferred the state of Zimbabwe to the blacks, the nation, however, to the whites.”
Thomas Wulffen
Article in Business Day as PDF
Thomas Wulffen (born 1954), art critic and curator. Writes, among other, for Kunstforum International, whose editor he was for several special issues. Lives in Berlin.
Translation from German by Andreas Brunstermann.
yellow, yellow, yellow
Yellow ist not always yellow. Yellow ist the colour of light and of lie. We all have our own definitions of coloures. How we experience, remember and categorize the colour is the projects subject and motif. Is the yellow-colour on the printed photography still to be counted as yellow or has it changed into a green-colour - that is dependent on several factors on the way.
The work Composition with yellow (part of the Installation) consists of a series of quadratically shaped photographs (details) of yellow objects and surfaces that I took durings my rambles across Berlin.
Aage Langhelle
THE ARCHIVIST'S CABINET
“This book is based on a text by Borges. (...)
This text quotes “a certain chinese encyclopedia” which says that “the animals are sorted as follows:
a) animals who belong to the emperor,
b) embalmed animals,
c) tamed,
d) milkporks,
e) sirens,
f) mythical creatures,
g) stray dogs,
h) those who belong to this group,
i) those who act like mad,
k) those who are drawn with a very fine paintbrush made from camelhair,
l) and so on, m) those who broke the waterjug,
n) those who look like flies from a distance.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
And that's not all: in some parts of Africa - Tanzania for example - medical tablets are not sold for their function or their effect; you can't go to a pharmacy and buy tablets for malaria or the flu. Instead drugs are arranged by their shape and their colour: you can buy either green or pink, white or yellow tablets. Or you can choose between round or oval, spherical or liquid drugs. What would you like? I'll take green oval capsules, please. I'd like some pale pink liquid. What these pink liquids and oval capsules are for is of secundary importance. Their function may never be discussed at all.
The description of these chinese or tanzanian cases does not illustrate an absurd or meaningless order. It simply shows that there is some order in which these objects are integrated, whether or not we understand the order represented by these situations. The examples demonstrate that the things are not the things. A tablet is not a tablet and an animal is not an animal. A tremendous chasm separates every object from itself. The phonetic articulation is part of a whole system of relationships and meanings which instantly collapses as soon as it is confronted with an alternate system.
Like objects and their names, colours are also a part of this extensive system. There are not the objects on one side and the colours - that they coincidentally have - on the other. Colours are not the disguise of things, they're not added to them or removed from them. We can't think of objects separately from their colour. Every object has a colour - always. Colours are unremovable aspects of things. But how do things get connected to their colours - and colours to their things? And how, in the beginning or finally, do these arrangements of objects and colours get related to their sense and meaning? How does it work - while we're on the subject - that the colour yellow connotes lying and falsehood. Why not the contrary? And why is this different in other cultures??
Aage Langhelle's work does not focus on the actual assignment of colours to things and to a certain meaning. It is not about the colour yellow and its significance. It could as well be any other colour that is questioned by Langhelle. His work is situated on a more profound level. It is not about a colour as a colour. It is about the system of assignement that they belong to, about the structures of assortment by which colours are added to things and bestowed with meanings, and about the cultural constants by which the assignment of colours is ordered - it is about laws and regulations that make sure that an object has exactly this and no other colour.
That's the difference between an archive of colours and an open range of colours: in an archive it's not about the colours of Mondrian - was it this or that colour and what meaning does it have? But it is about the facts that were caused by this colour and about the rules that were produced by this colour as far as art-history is concerned. It is not about the designing of colours in a staircase of Oskar Schlemmer, but about the question, which order or what archive make it possible that exactly this certain staircase-colour is quoted and no other. And it is not about the scandalous connection between Mondrian and Donald Duck - the mix of high and low, everyday-life and art - but simply about the fact of the archivist's recognition that both pictures, Mondrian and Donald Duck, do work with the same colour. If in the future a certain tone of yellow would be entered into a digital photo-search engine, the technical archive of this image retrieval would show the future gallery on the screen: Mondrian next to Donald Duck.
The archivist's view is producing a new order of visual knowledge. Langhelle deconstructs well-known visual orders and puts them together in a new way. Here we see the importance of art history as one of the most powerful visual orders of our culture. Its archive is broken apart and then re-arranged by new criteria. This new criterion of colour leads to a mixing with objects of everyday life; but this mixing is not the theme - instead it is a neccessary consequence of the archivist's decision. He forgets about the function and form of objects and simply puts them into a new order only by their colour. Langhelle works with the visual order of somebody buying tablets in Tansania.
A new archive of the colour yellow is started, a new grouping in the order of things is established. This new grouping is not at all an arrangement of old things in another way; the objects are not only rearranged, they are also recreated by this. Like in a dream or in memories the objects also regenerate in this new grouping. As if the isolation of a simple object would dissolve in its new surrounding - as if the single object would never have existed as an isolated one - all of a sudden they change. Aage Lanhelle's cabinet is a magical place of transformation and metamorphosis.
This transformation, this mixing of one thing with another, is materialized in Langhelle's woven pictures: an isolated picture dissolves and gets woven together with an other. Just as in the digital photo search engine Mondrian and Donald Duck are linked because of the new ordering criteria, two pictures are woven together though they have nothing in common in a traditional ordering system. They form a new picture. By this, Langhelle recreates manually the process involved in digital media. The visual order of the future will be just as surprising as Langhelle's ever changing arrangements. But the archives do not only regulate the future.
Memory is the first archive. Memory shows that we don't memorize colours as colours, but only in their connection to things - so to speak colours as objects or colours as things. We remember the colour of a dress, the colour of the room or the screen's colour. But these objects don't simply appear, just as the colour didn't just appear out of nowhere. Instead the colours cling to a certain object, they appear together with them and form an undividable unity. So the dress' fabric can't be separated from the colour it has or has been dyed. As well, the colour of a room can't be separated from the room's walls, from the material and the way the colour was applied. Archive means the different possible ways by which colours can be connected to material.
Memory shows that every archive is connected to its material and because of that to its place. What distinguishes Langhelle's manual work from digital media is the concreteness of his archives. Like the first archives in antique Greece signified the unity of place and object, like an experiment in a laboratory has its concrete place and time, the concrete materialization of an archive exists only at one place: for instance in the pavillon of the Volksbühne. At any other place the archive is different. Every new arrangement of Langhelle's archive could have a thousand ways, but only one is possible and can be materialized.
As in a laboratory or in a modular construction system there are all different elements that are neccessary to create something new; but because of the limited number of these elements the new thing can only have one certain form. Langhelle's archives of colour are radically contingent; they don't exist from what he shows - but the colour's archives have their existence from what can be shown. Though what can be shown - and the examples of the tansanian tablets or the chinese animals demonstrate it as well - is always a frontier.
And so Foucault goes on with his example:
“With the amazement about this taxinomy we reach with one leap what is called in this list the exotic magic of an other thinking - the frontier of our thinking: the pure impossibility to think it.”
Knut Ebeling
Review in TIP as PDF
See section Press for more articles and reviews.
Translated from German by Andreas Brunstermann
Publications:
2001 - Moskauer Tagebuch, Wien, Passagen.
1998 Carl-Einstein-Award for art critic.
Writes for PARKETT, Eikon, Der Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Parking lot
The areas around the trees in the streets of Berlin often have the shape and size of parking lots. These small spots are used by the city's inhabitants in different ways. Some take it as a perfect opportunity to lay out a small garden, others use it commercially, for instance to gain additional space for restaurant seats.
Article in Bergens Tidende as PDF
ddr at Alexandeplatz U2
ddr-logos
In 1990 the state DDR (German Democratic Republic) was dissolved and the new born provinces joined the former Federal Republic. What happened after the wall came down, how and on which premises the reunification took place – very different opinions exist on this. This complicated process of transformation Germany went through, and still does, is a central subject in this project. 
This process is reflected in the transformation that the term DDR is going through in my work. The abbreviation for the socialist country becomes a trademark-logo1.
The logos on the billboards intend to remind of well-known trademark-logos without being recognized too easily. They play with Ostalgia and the recognition of brands that represented the west. A clear identification is deliberately avoided. By strong contrasts in colour they clearly step into the foreground and accentuate the underground station.
1. They were developed in a nonprofit-cooperation with the design company 52Nord in Berlin.
Politik, Aktion und Kunst - die Stadt als demokratischer Erfahrungsraum
Ein Diskurs über Urbanität, städtische Gestaltung und Kommunikationsstrategien im öffentlichen Raum kann existierende Gesellschaftsstrukturen potentiell offen legen und alternative Modelle aufzeigen. Modelle die in der Praxis ein breiteres Erfahrungsfeld beinhalten, als es der urbane Raum heutzutage seinen Einwohnern/Benutzern anbieten kann. In einem solchen Diskurs lege ich Wert auf den öffentlichen Raum als soziale Arena, in dem die Kommunikation zwischen den Einwohnern der Stadt eine zentrale Stellung einnimmt. Wer kommt in der heutigen Gesellschaft zu Wort und welche Form nimmt dieses Sprechen an? Wie man mit Kunst und Kunstprojekten im öffentlichen Raum umgeht ist selbstverständlich davon abhängig, wie man sich selbst gegenüber dem Begriff Kunst verhält und welche Position man im öffentlichen Raum und in der politischen/kulturpolitischen Landschaft einnimmt. Meiner Ansicht nach kann ein Großteil unserer öffentlich- visuellen Symbolproduktion, direkt oder indirekt, als ein Beitrag zu Meinungsbildungsprozessen betrachtet werden. Dieses zu problematisieren war eine maßgebliche Intention in meinem ddr-projekt - das in einer situationistischen Tradition steht, und sich darüber hinaus auch einer Adbuster-Strategie bedient.
Mein Projekt, in dem die Buchstaben ddr in die aktuelle Warenwelt der kommerziellen Logos transportiert wurden, bekam - wie gewünscht - viel Aufmerksamkeit und wurde lebhaft kommentiert. Das Spektrum von Reaktionen reichte von der Graffiti-Gruppe cbs, die - unter Verwendung einer eingeschränkten Auffassung von der gesellschaftskritischen Nutzung des öffentlichen Raums - bemängelte, das Projekt lasse eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den Mechanismen der Werbung vermissen, bis hin zu Politikern im Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus1 , denen ddr absurderweise wie eine Verherrlichung des ehemaligen Unrechtsstaates vorkam. ddr stieß beim Publikum und auch in der nationalen und internationalen Presse auf reges Interesse - über 30 Printmedien sowie mehrere Radio- und TV-Sender berichteten über das Projekt.
Aage Langhelle, August 2004
1 In einer kleinen Anfrage im Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus wollte der F.D.P.-Abgeordnete Krestel von der zuständigen Senatsverwaltung wissen, ob die Signets nicht ein Unrechtssystem verherrlichen würden, während eine Sprayergruppe auf dem Bahnhof in einer Nacht- und Nebelaktion eine Plakatwand gegen ihr eigenes Logo CBS austauschte. Nach geraumer Zeit tauchte die von CBS entwendete ddr - Plakatfläche plötzlich wieder auf – gut sichtbar montiert an die Fassade des Kaufhofes am Alexanderplatz.
See also: www.ddr-u2.de
Article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung as PDF
See presse for more articles and reviews about ddr.
(con)temporary spaces Berlin
(con)temporary in the sense of temporary and coeval.
In many years I took pictures of places, buildings and objects in the urban space that more or less emerged ”coincidently”, not being perceived consciously. Constructions and objects which are often not integrated into the formal structures of a western metropolis. Mostly they result from improvisational problem solvings, respectively they are affected by this. Thus they are unusual in the traditional criteria and categories of ”good” architecture and design.
Bird Houses
In Berlin findet man eine Vielzahl verschiedener, selbstgefertigter Vogelkästen. Hier ist eine Auswahl, die ich in den letzten Jahren fotografiert habe, wenn ich mit dem Fahrrad unterwegs war.
Collateral Image
With Collateral Image , Langhelle is examinating the relation between politically motivated graffiti on one side and advertising posters and commercial products on the other. Among others we see photos that Langhelle took in Berlin. Using a rather physical process, he manipulates the advertising message by adding graffiti to them. He takes pictures of graffiti which he finds in the urban space, cutting them into pieces and pasting certain details upon posters or objects. Sometimes, it takes weeks before theses pictures are removed from the advertising posters again. Thus he's focussing on two questions: What effect does this double message have and who gets a chance to speak in the public space?
The photos are portrays of the polarization in public space. Langhelle is melting together the end points and investigates the repercussion. In two of his works, this is a physical process: the photos are literally woven into eachother.
The exhibition's title refers to the term collateral damage . This expression originally was used as an euphemism for accidents or unintended damages that result from military actions. Langhelle regards his artwork as a way of artistic actionism.
In most cases, graffiti is an illegal form of expression, used by young people in the underground ambiance who simply don't have means to convey their messages by advertising, or who just don't want to contribute to any commercialization of society. They accuse the bourgeoisie of controlling mainstream media and thus excluding any radical or alternative opinion. Nevertheless, politically motivated graffiti and commercial advertising try to achieve a common purpose: communicating a message as direct as possible.
The artist roamed his immediate neighbourhood, taking picturs of what he saw. People working with graffiti also operate in their close neighbourhood, often in a range of 3-4 kilometers. In this way, the exhibition literally represents a personal walk through Berlin.
Daniella van Dijk-Wennberg
Curator Oslo Museum
