"Studio Portraits from Bamako 1960-1980" and early vintages

september 16 - november 11, 2006

raum1: Rosemary Laing "weather"

In this series of large scale colour photographs "weather" is an analogy which links the effects of climate, and climate change, on landscape and the human being with the effects of political and social 'climates'. On a formal level the series "weather" is a synthesis of the elements that have formed Laing's artistic practice, bringing together the performative, documentary and object intervention strands. The first part with 6 motifs was completed in august 2006.

Weather #5, (c-print, 124 x 168,5 cm, ed. 8) shows an isolated female figure against a bluish skylike background. She is caught mid air in a maelstrom of wind. Buffeted by the elements she seems to be moving through time as much as through space. This image is one from the component of performative photographs in which Laing has staged the effects of extreme weather conditions upon a performer. These images provide a poetic counterpoint to the landscape photographs, as the human presence is made palpable, but it is one that is suspended in a vortex of influence (climatic or events) over which she can not exert individual agency.

These photographes continue Laing's interest in physics and movement as both physical fact and symbolic metaphor. As with Laing's previous series, these images are visually arresting embodiments of a skein of social, political and cultural references, charted through particular places and histories.

Weather (Eden) #1 (c-print, 124 x 235 cm, ed. 8) is one of three location based landscape photographs of the "weather" series. Eden was one of Australia´s most important whaling centres, one in which a truly edenic landscape was the site of belching blubber, processing works, and a bay rinsed red with blood during a kill. With the collapse of the whaling industry and in recent years the tuna processing plant Eden is a beautiful, decaying and scarred location (which has echoes in many places around the world), haunted by this past and trying to find an economic future through a now unsustainable fishing industry.

Turning the focus from the waterfront to the blasted melaleuca clad headlands shaped by ferocious storms Laing has woven skeins of colour from nylon fishing nets into this undergrowth, creating images of desolate beauty that catch an elemental interplay between climate, economy, and histories of inhabitation.

raum2: Malick Sidibé "Studio Portraits from Bamako 1960-1980"

vintage prints and newly printed silver gelantin prints

"scary tales"

Rosemary Laing (AUS), Thomas Weisskopf (CH), Anna Wenzel (NL)

Catharina van Eetvelde (B), Simon English (UK), Marcel Gaehler (CH), Jana Gunstheimer (D), Caro Suehrkemper (D), Jelena Tomasevic (Montenegro)

september 30 - november 11, 2006

1st. opening: saturday september 30, 2006 6 pm - 9 pm

New in Berlin: FILIALE

by Conrads, Duesseldorf/Roemerapotheke, Zuerich

Brunnenstr. 188-190 . D-10119 Berlin-Mitte

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opening hours: Tue-Sat 12-6 pm