anee mann

(* in München, lebt und arbeitet in Paris)

Austellungen:

1998	"Dimensionalitäten", ProjectUnited, Berlingen
1999	"Warum gab es mehr Fortschritt beim Kochen als beim Sex?", mit Roswitha Huber, Wagnerstraße, München
2000	"art frankfurt", ProjectsUnited, Frankfurt "Landscapes", ProjectsUnited, Schloss Brunegg (CH) "Das trojanische Pferd", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg "Gab es nun mehr Fortschritt beim Kochen als beim Sex?" mit Roswitha Huber, München
2001	"ANEE MANN" (Einzelausstellung), Consulting McKinsey, München "Vielfalt - Einheit", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg "Mit vollem Munde spricht man nicht", Galerie der Künstler, München
2002	"Drehpunkte", ProjectsUnited, Bad Aibling "Mit vollem Munde spricht man nicht", Museum der Stadt Kiel
2003	"bright" (Einzelausstellung), Galerie Heike Curtze, Wien
2004	"Konzentrationen", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg
2005	"Kunst.Messe.Linz", Galerie Thiele, Landesmuseum Linz "Standpunkte", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg "bright" (Einzelausstellung), Virsalis by Günter Salzmann, Innsbruck
2006	"I-beam" (Einzelausstellung), Galerie Heike Curtze, Wien "bodyproofs" mit Petra Sterry, Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg ARCO Art Fair (Galerie Heike Curtze), Madrid "Menschenbilder", Hans-Schuster-Haus, Rosenheim
2007	"Illusion", Caroline Smulders, Paris CORNICE Art Fair (Galerie Heike Curtze), Venedig "Spannungsfelder", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg
2008	"Sonnengold", Galerie Heike Curtze, Salzburg "O-M-I" solo show, Galerie Heike Curtze, Wien "Konschthaus beim Engel" Ministère de la Culture, Luxemburg "Viennafair" Messe, Galerie Heike Curtze, Wien
2009	"Un salon particulier" Paridudessin, Caroline Schmulders, Paris "O-M-I", solo show, Galerie Heike Curtze, Berlin "Arte Fiera", fair, Galerie Heike Curtze in Bologna

With the smallest as well as the greatest happiness,
joy becomes joy in the same way:
by forgetting or, in more scholarly terms,
the capacity to sense things unhistorically for as long
as the happiness lasts. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

More than any other visual medium, (digital) photography clings to its badge of being the art
of remembrance. And more than any other visual medium, photography is described as the
art of the detail. As the first time-dependent image in the history of imagery, this medium is,
in fact, the art of time. And as the first light-exposed image in the history of imagery, it is
unique in the way it joins, even marries, time and light to form a kind of exposed time.
Therefore, photographs are not duplicates, not copies or reproductions of what is depicted.
Rather, they are "emanations of past reality". (Roland Barthes) 

 

"Searching for traces of the past in detailed shots from my grandparent's home" is how anee
mann describes her latest photographic series. Over a period of months, she launched a photographic
investigation into her own history, an investigation into the possibility and impossibility
of subjective, personal remembrance. Cautiously, carefully, sometimes even hesitantly
and distraught, she embarks on a journey to her own childhood, and therefore to that home
to which we can never return, as Ernst Bloch put it in "The Principle of Hope".

However, remembering the past is always a way to construct the present; we cannot commit
the past to memory except as it relates to the present. Unlike history, which suggests
that truth lies in the factual, artistic discourse is always aware of the fact that aesthetic strategies
are needed to enable us to "perceive" the past as the present (and the historical narrative
itself is a aesthetic-linguistic construct). anee mann is well aware of this. With a variety
of aesthetic approaches and strategies, she uses artistic constructs to draw attention to
the difference between objects and their depiction. Through the photographic principle of multiple
exposure, we are able to see that a view of the past is not one-dimensional, but rather
multi-layered and complex. At the same time, this pictoral layering provides a hint of that
visual and imaginary moment at which things disappear and appear, which, in effect, constitutes
our capacity to remember. The concept of fading is a central one; in photography, we
speak of fading in and out. More than any other medium, photography is able to vividly depict
and convey this process, and like no other medium, it can transform absence into presence.


This is what makes photography the art of the detail, the art of depicted things and objects,
which themselves act as a metaphor for temporality. The tiniest glimpse disrupts the present,
resulting in a singular atemporality. By photographically interweaving the present with
the past, the absent object with what is visible in the present, an effect arises that causes
perception and time to implode.

In one series, the photographs are also accentuated by a strip of color framing the entire
image. This approach further emphasizes and intensifies the relationship between the near
and the far, between distance and intimacy, turning the photographic images themselves into
"objects". anee mann deliberately chose the medium of color photography, since B/W photography
would imply the moment of nostalgia much more emphatically, producing a kind of
visual short-circuit, tempered by perception, between the present and the past. This also interrupts
the view of what is observed and, at the same time, equates the phenomenon of
remembrance with the artist's own point of view: the past can only be experienced as the
present.

This is also the "magical" moment where the photographic work of remembering implies the
power of a futurity rooted in the present. To want to remember always means constructing
the future. More than any other visual medium, therefore, photography is fraught with melancholy
and optimism in equal measure, since it creates a dual discourse: the message of
time's passage, combined with the message of it returning in the form of a preserved future
time. "Rather than casting a nostalgic glance at the past, photography deals with the inevitability
of an unattainable future," writes Hubert von Amelunxen.

Photography itself therefore unavoidably becomes a time-wasted ruin. Arising in an era of
acceleration, an era of the inversion of space and time, photography becomes a momentum
of time, a monument to this new temporality of an industrialized society by appearing to
undermine it. But only in the artistic discourse of remembrance is photography able to preserve
its temporal delirium so that it can be absorbed – this is also clearly demonstrated by
anee mann's new work.

However, the punctum of this photographic work, which Barthes refers to as "the randomness
of the form", is that it "pierces me (but also wounds me)", that the moment at which the
image series ends is also the moment at which anee mann's grandmother dies. "This new
punctum, no longer one of form, but rather one of proximity, is TIME. It is the unsettling
emphasis on noema (‘that's-how-it-was’), its pure representation." "O-M-I", as the new work is
titled, is therefore not only a subjective work of remembrance, but also the incorruptible and
exclusive witness to this remembrance itself, its own history, its own certification.

Carl Aigner
Director of the Regional Museum of Lower Austria