Rainer Strzolka

Russian cult Rainer Strzolka

FED Mikron and Hannover - how does this fit together? It works... On the one hand, there are more Russians in Hanover than in some Russian cities. On the other hand, the combination of a desolate Russian camera and a desolate still partially German city ensures a dialectic of photographic aesthetics that makes fun of life in small-format, much too colorful pictures. What else is there for the viewer in view of a city administration whose gendering craze is half Germany laughing at ... If you already have to live in Hanover: buy a FED micron, an expired color film. Come play!This volume shows for the first time all photographs of an installation at Hof Carlsen that was shown there for exactly one day, on February 4, 2020. The present print edition makes this installation permanent. Rainer Strzolka (°1956, Berlin, Germany) makes photos, installations and conceptual artworks. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, Strzolka wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation. His photos are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. In a search for new methods to 'read the city', he makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he focuses on the idea of 'public space' and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. Rainer Strzolka currently lives and works in Leipzig.