Installation Proposal: printed on fine art paper, unframed, glued to the floor next to A Gentle Touch (newspaper roll)
Intimate Encounter is part of the project Revolt Against Certainty
Revolt Against Certainty is a love letter to the Absurd. It is meant to be an antidote to the harsh rationalism of our times in which we forgot how to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty – where subjectivity is a vice and everything demands to be definite.
The photographs are an investigation on the category of the fact – in relation to the world in general, but also in reference to the medium of photography, wich is being used and misused as a means of evidence. Nowadays there seems to be a broad belief in the concept of the fact, to wich social and political discussions are asked to subdue themselfes to in order to be taken seriously. This belief might be based on the desire to put the world into order, to gain power over an otherwise strange and absurd world. We tend to neglect that some things might be to complex to be put into the category of true and false. Revolt Against Certainty can therefore be regarded as a relativistic project. It also questions the basic structure of the information age which consists of binary either/or-relations. In this setting, no room for ambiguity persists and individuality is in danger of disappearing in general categories.
Most evidently in times of great uncertainty, when incidents and circumstances can no longer or not yet be claimed as true or false, a tolerance for the absurd and impalpable can be helpful. Likewise, an intolerance for ambiguity seems to reveal itself in the uprising of conspiracy theories. By simplifying circumstances and making seemingly causal links, the uncertain becomes more tangible. For some, it seems to be easier to live in elusive clarity than in impenetrable uncertainty.
Revolt Against Certainty proposes to not only accept the world as an highly ambivalent and absurd place, but to cherish this circumstance. Reason and the rational mind can’t find access to the photographs. The photos refuse to clarify the world or to claim anything. Instead, the pictures are meant as fields of interpretive possibilities for the viewer. They offer room wich can be taken in by the full complexity of the recieving individual.
