PLEASE WAIT BEHIND THE RED LINE (2011/2021)
please wait behind the red line (2011/2021)
Found images, inkjet, object, steel, glass
Almost exactly 10 years ago I was invited to and part of an international group show in Cork, Ireland called Terminal Convention. It was curated by Peter Gorschlüter. The exhibition took place in a decommissioned former international airport featuring artists like Douglas Gordon, Rosa Barba, Le Pavillon (Palais de Tokyo/Paris) all creating responses to this very unique abandoned site. My work, RETAIN, was centered around 2,977 small jpegs of security and ID images of airport visitors in the 90s found on old CD’s during a site visit while digging through left-behind electronic trash. They were in essence the left behind stories of identity and identification. These early digital artifacts, most of them less than 100k in resolution, became the departure point for my work in 2011, using them both as a social connector of layers of histories, locality and geography as well as the material for my inquiry into early low resolution digital image making, old reconfigured technologies and the airport as an image maker and cinematic apparatus in itself (x-rays, visitor badges, training videos, snapshots).
During the Microhistories course at Konstfack I decide to return to this archive of early digital original images in an attempt at renegotiating this material. The added layer of time displacement intrigued me (2011/2021), to look at my own previous work as an archive and by returning to them again in 2021 they became a way for me to make new work out of existing work, to further explore the airport as a place for stories, and to connect and reflect on a photographic practices, the promise of digital technology and gazing at the material in the context of a post pandemic era where travel, globalization and our sense of collective security is still being questioned.
The project Please wait behind the red line 2011/2021 is both a deeper exposition in Research Catalogue as well as visual presentation that was part of a group show at Konstfack Sept 2021.
Images by Timo Menke
