베른트 할프헤르 Intersections

tion, Bernd Halbherr uses the ‘sampling’ technique familiar from electronic music, in which the motifs of the original pictures melt into colour shades and tones. In the virtual reality of digital picture media, photography and video are experiencing a repetition of Modernism’s real utopia of transformation into an image that, at the end of the process of transformation, as an autonomous work of art, now only ‘sounds’ to itself in colour tones that no longer reveal the secret of its origins.

Halbherr began his series of ‘Short Stories’ in 2002. They are based on video footage of specific places, in this case the Savina Museum. In the rows of minimised stills, the motifs dissipate into abstract flows of colour elements in which only the colour movements remain visible as the essential dynamic of time and space. Arranged in rows, shimmering images are created in which the countless individual pictures, with their colour and light gradients, fuse into one new autonomous picture landscape. Every picture can be read as the musical score of the feelings triggered by these sequences of images – feelings that prompt an abstract, possibly synestheticinterpretation like the sound of a polyphonic synthetic orchestra and its internal movement.

The video projection CNN News (2011) should be seen in this conceptual context. Every five minutes the darkness is interrupted for a few seconds and 400 news headlines taken from the CNN channel are shown at the same time. These 400 TV images also merge to create one large shimmering image. Optically, the mosaic-like welter of individual moving images becomes one glimmering pattern.

In parallel to that, on an acoustic level the content and form of the audio dissolves into a unifying sound that verges on white noise.

Once again Bernd Halbherr’s artistic conception finds a meta-plane, a picture of pictures, from the individual picture to the subject of the picture as abstract structure. In the critical discourse about the all-encompassing simultaneity of events and about perception in the face of the overabundance of pictures, this video piece functions as a visual and acoustic thesis and question at the same time.

In the spherical photo sculptures, spatial perception is at issue in a particular and astonishing way. A360°-panorama photographic image is projected onto the sphere. The focus is on a symbiosis of the sculptural and the photographic conception of space. The relationship between the real, three-dimensional object and the photo, which forms its outer skin and its imaginary interior, is particularly interesting. The panorama plays an important role because the artist is fascinated by its claim to totality, and by the radical form of the circle and the sphere, which defines the sculptural form and is implied in the specific view in each respective photograph.

Where the observer’s viewpoint fails to offer a panorama view, his powers of imagination will complete the picture. He sees the image from outside and at the same time has an experience of himself at its centre. It appears as if the sphere had recorded the panorama of another place in its centre. While the spheres have until now usually stood on the ground and have therefore asserted their direct presence in the room, which was at the same time irritatingly contradictory to the image on display, they are now integrated into the installations of the exhibition. In the installation entitled Rescue (2015), the sphere is suspended in a net hung between red-andwhite surveying poles and shows a picture of the Anseong Campus of Chung Ang University. In Stadel (2015), the sphere shows and contains a picture of stables that no longer exist on his uncle’s farm, ‘a place full of memories’ (Bernd Halbherr). On three poles high above, the installation thematises the distance to this place and these memories. The spheres, because they become transparent and clear through the photography, have a particular optical magic for our perception, which is in any case called into question. After all, the sphere – beyond its geometric determination – is also a metaphor for the world. With each particular installation the artist gives the sphere an additional context and further interpretative scope.

The kinetics of the subject of the picture and its perception are one of the artistic themes explored by Bernd Halbherr – he is interested in exploring the limits and borders of pictures in his work. It is not when the pictures are taken with the camera but in the postphotographic processing of the pictures that the imaging opportunities develop and with them his artistic theses as discussed above.

(Translation from German: Dr. Seiriol Dafydd, Aberystwyth, Wales, Great Britain) 21