In this solo exhibition, MdbK focuses on the work of the internationally renowned Leipzig-based photographer Ricarda Roggan (b. 1972). Alongside the new series 1971 in the entrance area, the exhibition presents important works from various phases of the artist’s career that provide insights into her rich oeuvre.
Ricarda Roggan is interested in things and their location. Her works do not depict people, but rather their traces and remains. The things and habitats refer to these traces, show that they were abandoned, forgotten, and left with traces of wear and tear and time inscribed on them. When viewing Roggan’s photographs, after a while questions and doubts arise about the order of things and spaces. Factories devoid of people, studios, courtyards, cellars, forests, and left behind video game machines, furniture, and objects of use are viewed, transformed, restaged, and then captured using analog photography.
In her latest series 1971, Roggan deals with photographs by the artist Timm Rautert, with whom she studied in Leipzig from 1996 to 2004. In 1971, Rautert took photographs of objects at the New York studio of the American conceptual and minimal artist Walter De Maria. Fifty years later, Roggan restaged these photographs in Leipzig at the Baumwollspinnerei—a former cotton mill and today’s cultural center Spinnerei—when it was vacant for a short period. The place is special to the artist: she created her first works there.
For the series 1971, the artist used Chromaluxe printing for the first time, a technique known for its durability. In the work series shown, like Reset, we see old video game machines, dusty and discarded, in a location that cannot be otherwise defined. By way of their size, they seem to explode the spatial limitations of the image. In Set, a set for a photo-shoot becomes a mysterious, autonomous space between painterly, abstract, and figurative elements. Between the triptych Tables and Chairs and Bench from the collection of MdbK, condensed forest scenes, stairwells, and abandoned locations can be found. Roggan’s works leave it up to the beholders to decide whether they will take on the role of the artist as trace searcher, archaeologist, and observer. Roggan searches, digs, layers things and finds new visual scenes that examine the subjects of staging and restaging, work in the studio, and the artistic process.
“Art is the dark wish of all things”, Rainer Maria Wilke wrote in his “Notes on Art.” Roggan’s artistic practice of photographically preserving things and places that she has perceived in her works refers to this Rilke quotation: the works refuse forgetting in their new spatiotemporal order.
