Boris Duhm: Greetings from Space

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An exhibition resurrected from the original WordPress archive of the Godot Gallery.

Full exhibition text

The Godot Gallery invites you

Boris Duhm

Greetings from Space

for its exhibition titled ___

Opening: 2009 on 3 June at 20 o’clock

Opening: Szirtes János performance

Self as a Jumping Icebear

The Godot Gallery is, for the first time, presenting the work of Boris Duhm to a wider domestic audience. The exhibition will cover the artist’s broad spectrum across diverse media, from photography to painting, through video art to experimental alchemigrams.

Boris’s work is preoccupied with the tension between autonomous image-making and documentary representation, whether the basis is an invented or a specific subject, which the artist mediates through a personal filter and places into a stage‑like setting. Duhm creates unique narratives, developing a richly fanciful sense of time and space. Her ambition to manufacture complex dramaturgies that employ her works, allegories, and personifications fires her creative drive. The various layers of meaning form a complex web of associations and references, which point equally to personal biographical experiences or to religious and art‑historical parallels.

In the Swamps

The exhibition titled Greetings from Space presents photographs that were created without any digital post‑processing, using an analog technique. They depict a situation of isolation in the state of my alienation. The artist portrays himself as a tragic hero, naked, concealed only in a signalling‑like clown mask, and places traces of distant civilisation in a distinctive landscape setting that he carries alone. From 2007 onwards the series has been steadily produced, and a key consideration in choosing its locations is the presence of a mass‑communication apparatus within a markedly natural environment.

Tableaux Vivantes and the Garden Eden Performance series consist of staged photographs. The artist regularly invites friends to participate, who assume archetypal roles in the space choreographed by Duhm. In the actors’ interaction, imagination, spontaneous action and reaction are the guiding principles. The captured moments recorded in the photographs arouse curiosity in the viewer, wondering what might lie behind the deliberately stage‑set arrangements. These so‑called photo‑performances transform into images of the series as the stage situations – enriched with elements of chance and utopianism – evolve into pictorial compositions.

The Concilium

Alchemigrams bear witness to Duhm's experimental intervention within the very act of image-making. The abstract formations created through the interaction of photography and various materials—coffee, olive oil, soap, and so on—allow ample space for chance, for contingencies, and for imagination. The final result is at once faint and enduring.

In his painting, Duhm pursues a creative pathway that blends fictional, historical and biographical elements across varying temporal and spatial planes. He employs visual allusions as references and as a tribute to past painters, positioning their motifs within a newly allegorical space of depth. The same idea occupies the artist here: the possibilities of re‑creating images through the use of visual allusions.

Based on Sonja Oehler's writing, House of World Cultures HKW, Berlin 2009

Live on Mars

The exhibition is supported by Hummel Pincészet, Villány

www.weingut-hummel.com

The exhibition will be on display from June 27 until Tuesday to Friday 10 and 18, and on Saturday between 10 and 13 o’clock.

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