Trouw

Neon logo, 5 x 1,5 m, 2009

...what remains...

Research material (newspapers, archived material, stickers), drawings, 2009


© Exhibition view: ...what remains..., Andechsgalerie, Innsbruck, 2009. Photo: Werner Kopp

"An exhibition project about approaches to locations and the associations / memories connected with them. Snapshots of locations as symbols for the passage of time, shifts in meaning and what remains. From architectural portraits to addressing the fragmentary." This is how Annja Krautgasser defines the framework for the content of her new multimedia installation.
What happens to a building when it is abandoned? In the case, for example, of a former newspaper publishing landscape, which Annja Krautgasser was researching during her artist in residency in Amsterdam in 2008.
It changes hands, or somebody appropriates the empty building, occupying it—along with a new function.
The original use can, however, still be read both in the building's structure as well as in several other details. So the lettering TROUW (Engl. fidelity) remains on the façade as a relict, gaining a new independent meaning, and is transferred by Annja Krautgasser into the framework of an exhibition and so placed in a broader context.
The artist operates with components from the former newspaper district, providing research material, and she shows a further very direct approach to the topic in the video What remains.


© Exhibition view: ...what remains..., Andechsgalerie, Innsbruck, 2009. Photo: Werner Kopp

What remains (13 min.) combines both documentary as well as essayist approaches to film by leading the viewer through the abandoned landscape of buildings of the three daily newspapers in the Netherlands (Het Parool, Trouw and de Volkskrant) with a static camera taking nevertheless subjective shots—a subjective impression accentuated by the noise of the camera. The camera leads through empty corridors and captures the flair of the abandoned settings while also showing the interim alternative and commercial uses. The perspective changes—emphasised and structured by fades into black—and the viewers find themselves alternatively in one of the three buildings being shown. Orientation is provided by the monumental mastheads from their former-owners on the façades of the buildings. During the course of the video different locations and impressions combine to form one overall image, and sketch a pulsation urban district in a state of constant change.
This observation from many sides, adopting various viewpoints, and the exposure of the steps in the working procedure are typical for the artist's work. A very personal exploration of a topic followed by thorough research leads, via the narrative, to structured analyses; and the course of such a process frequently leads to an abstracted formal language. This is equally as clear as it is complex in its manifestation for the exhibition …what remains….


© Exhibition view: ...what remains..., Andechsgalerie, Innsbruck, 2009. Photo: Robert Fleischanderl

The lettering, which remains as a relic of the former Trouw publishing house, is transferred to the exhibition venue as a sculptural object. The setting of raw flooring panels, which serve as a platform for the carefully arranged research material and as a display for a photographic work, places the gallery in a state of transition, interweaving it in terms of content with the newspaper district 900 kilometres away. Snapshots in time of transitions and processes animate the viewer to think about basic issues.
Back to the abandoned building: when it is eventually demolished it remains in existence only in the images of it, and in people's memory. The old newspaper publishing buildings on Wibautstraat in Amsterdam can, although the artist employs them metaphorically to explore basic issues relating to durability and perpetuation, also allude to the artistic reflections and reminiscences of Annja Krautgasser herself.
(Ingeborg Erhart, Translation: Jonathan Quinn)



© Building view, Trouw/Het Parool, 2009


Further information to the video work What Remains here.