FLACHE WELT

Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl, Alena Meier
31 July– 09 August 2003, open Thurs, Fri 1-5 pm, Sat 12-4 pm
preview Wednesday, 30 July 2003, 6 pm
rm 103, 1st floor, Achilles House Cnr Commerce St and Custom St East, Auckland, NZ

2-19 September 2003, open Tues-Fri 12-4 pm
preview Monday, 1 September 2003, 5.30 pm
Ramp Gallery, Waikato Institute of Technology, Gate 2, Collingwood St, Hamilton, NZ

Douglas Kelaher, Warren Olds, Sriwhana Spong
27. september-11.Oktober 2003, geöffnet Do, Fr, Sa 16-19 h
Eröffnung am Freitag, 26. September 2003, 20 h
CAPRI, Brunnenstrasse 149, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Flache Welt (trans. flat earth) suggests some general strains in contemporary picture making and art production—the notion of burying occidental perspective in abstract painting, for example, or that of the screen— a surface of mediation whose flatness threatens the material or the original. To some it is simply a state of mind. At a stretch, the contemplation of flatness may allow us to imagine life on a saucer. We might simply cut a hole and crawl from Auckland to Berlin and back again. Perhaps a renaissance in flat thinking is developing; while today's technology bluffs the erasure of obstacles such as physical distance and the features of geophysical terrain, these measures of spatiality return unscathed—they still structure the dynamics of power in relation to sovereign states and borderless corporate entities.
The flat world of images provides a wide view and endless departure points or destinations for unlimited directional adventure. Our own location on this plane can not, however, be as simply altered as we might like to think. Critical reflection on such positional matters will invariably illuminate clichés and assumptions embedded in long distance communication – the attributes of such an exchange have informed the processes leading to two previous exhibitions in Auckland and Hamilton, as well as the current one here in CAPRI.
The positions evident in Flache Welt present variations on the theme of location and positionality: relationships to occidental landscape traditions, the colonial object of desire, territorial specificity, the treatment and reproduction of found images, and visual vocabularies charting spaces between the real and virtual.

Flache Welt is generously supported by the Goethe Institut Inter Nationes Wellington, and rm103 is generously supported by Creative New Zealand.

http://www.rm103.org/Capri/install/Cinstl.htm
http://ramp.mediarts.net.nz/