Marc Botschen

The work helix I-IIII _also Visions of Johanna is a photographic and textual examination of the relationships between image, thought and perception. In its combination of essay, photographs, short texts and found footage, the work deals with the attempt to break down the self-certainty of pictorial perception and to arrive at a dialectic of not-knowing. Photographically, the focus of the work lies on the examination of the image as a form of marking. Thus the images show, among other things, Nazi graffiti, a bomb crater from the Second World War, screenshots from videos of contemporary events or simply a vocabulary slip

The work helix I-IIII _also Visions of Johanna is a photographic and textual examination of the relationships between image, thought and perception. In its combination of essay, photographs, short texts and found footage, the work deals with the attempt to break down the self-certainty of pictorial perception and to arrive at a dialectic of not-knowing.
Photographically, the focus of the work lies on the examination of the image as a form of marking. Thus the images show, among other things, Nazi graffiti, a bomb crater from the Second World War, screenshots from videos of contemporary events or simply a vocabulary slip and a playground. They outline a visual, geographical and mental environment that has called for critical intellectual and photographic engagement. Through material displacement, confrontation and montage, the resulting linguistic and photographic images are juxtaposed, overlaid and fractured, their status complicated and their narratives unsettled – an interplay between the supposed DNA of images and their fantastical ideal, as the title of the work suggests.
In parallel to this the essay negotiates the open question of whether a photographic trace leads towards the real or away from it, and with its phenomenological perspective forms the intellectual thread of the work in book form.

The work consists of an artist‘s book with 4 parts and several exhibitions.

MARC BOTSCHEN

Helix I–IIII_auch Visions of Johanna