Documentary photography is based on the assumption of
a strict separation between image and reality. This certainty is reinforced by
the objective character of the photographs. They capture the present - the
reality prevailing at the time - for future generations. The basis for
Gehbauer's new series SURROGAT (2025) are photographs from the centre of
photogrammetrical images of the former GDR. Photogrammetrical images are
photographs of buildings and interiors taken as objectively as possible, often
from a central perspective, in order to be able to rebuild them as faithfully
as possible in the event of destruction, such as through war. They document and
preserve the present. The archives of the Deutsche Fotothek, where these
photographs are stored, thus form a kind of bridge from the past to the future.
Gehbauer has used AI to create images of fictitious
interiors from the photos of these interiors in need of renovation, whose
magnificent stucco still suggests other times, in which enigmatic objects and
non-functioning doors can evoke feelings of loss and isolation, as in Franz
Kafka's novel The Castle (1926).
If you switch from the mode of relaxed
disinterestedness - which is inherent to both the reception of art (because art
has no claim to truth) and the usually trusting attitude towards the
documentary photos in an archive that are considered to be true - to a mode of
rational scrutiny, it becomes clear that the images cannot be ‘real’. For
example, the floor would have collapsed long ago under the weight of a
twenty-tonne boulder - and how could the huge stone have been transported into
the room in the first place?
Even the long shadows in the dreamlike paintings of
empty squares and architectural structures by the Italian artist Giorgio de
Chirico (1888-1978) do not usually conform to the laws of physics. They are
exaggeratedly long, fall in unusual directions or seem to be created by several
light sources at the same time. They thus refer to a timeless world of what
does not exist in reality, but in the spiritual - and as an image of the
spiritual in pictures - in its own surreal way. By stripping the archive photographs
of their actual documentary function with the help of AI and imagining
functionless or organic objects in the spaces, Gehbauer adds a poetic,
imponderable moment to the narrative about the present at a certain point in
time, which is preserved for the future in the form of the photographs in the
archive, and which eludes the usual order. Layers of temporality overlap. And
what is considered to be the normative order - stabilised by state claims to
truth as well as by photogrammetrical images - is mixed with elements of myth,
i.e. fictional and artistic elements, so that alternative truths become
conceivable.
Excerpts from Alicja Schindler´s exhibition Text to METAMORPHOSIS, Kjubh Kunstverein, Köln.
