In his works, Paul Kolling deals with current issues of economy, ecology, and the development of complex infrastructures over the past two centuries. For his exhibition “Nadir” at Kunstverein München, Kolling has conceived a new work that examines the history of aerial photography and the Hansa Luftbild GmbH. The development of so-called aerophotogrammetry a little over a hundred years ago led to a change in perspective from the horizontal to the vertical and required a completely new way of “reading” images. The artist traces this new or rather shifted perspective on the environment and the resulting change in the perception of space and of the self.
By using technical systems and self-written code, Kolling creates installations, sculptures, and videos that move between analog and digital space. His research-based works complicate conventional notions of recording and classifying space, confronting the viewer with the act of observing as a process governed by interests. This aspect is also inscribed into the exhibition in Munich. Here, the so-called “Luftbild-Lesebücher” (aerial photo readers), published by the Hansa Luftbild from the 1920s onwards, serve as a point of departure. 1 They contain instructional and educational images as well as topological analyses, providing a socio-ideological framework for a development that was initially motivated purely by military objectives.
Aerial photographs define, convey, and illustrate spatial (geo)information. Since the First World War, they have been a key feature of both military reconnaissance and civilian aerial survey and marked the transition from topological to Cartesian space. The images generated by aerial reconnaissance have an operational meaning and a claim of order, but no perspectival or spatially representative character. Accordingly, they were rectified and georeferenced using complex procedures. Their two-dimensionality makes them evaluable, whereby this “mechanical objectivity” forms the basis of the Cartesian coordinate system and the visualization of “real” spaces used to this day. This form of territorial development was no longer concerned with the mere representation of spatial relations, but with a now possible comprehensive surveying. Through the visualized rasterization of territory, the reproducible surface of the earth underwent a first stratification in addition to its discretization, i.e. the division of the calculated territory into small parts. This meant that knowledge of the terrestrial surface increasingly became systematic knowledge of what was hidden beneath—from archaeological artifacts and natural resources to troops hidden in forests.
Accordingly, photography played a central role in the technical constitution of the military gaze as well as the allocation of national and property boundaries. In his new work of the same name as the exhibition, Kolling deals with precisely these complex socio-political and economic relationships.
The film projection Nadir (2023–24) presented in the main space of the Kunstverein shows a loose reconstruction of a flight by the Hansa Luftbild based on images from the “Lesebuch.” Originally taken for cartographic purposes, the images were printed in the reader without any references and thus reduced to pure learning material.
There is an underlying discrepancy between the media-historical significance of the territories depicted in the work and their simultaneous non-existence: when the Hansa Luftbild archive burned down shortly after the Second World War, the original photographs and thus also the localizability of where they were taken were lost.
For Nadir, Kolling located a number of sites of the original flight route by allocating permanent geo-features, photographed them and reassembled the images for the film projection. The “moved” image work thus attempts to contrast the absolutist claim of this process by pursuing an opposing approach in the depiction of the flight route. The rectification of the flight path in order to expose on 35 mm film erases any geographical invariant, from direction to distance; there are no more cardinal points or orientation. The dissolution of Cartesian space produces image data that are legible to the human eye, but follow a completely new, non-transparent and two-dimensionalized topology.
The exhibition’s title contains this very ambivalence: on the one hand, “nadir” describes the opposite pole of the zenith and is therefore a directional indication in the sense of the “point on the celestial sphere that is directly [ . . . ] downward from the observer.” 2 On the other hand, the term can also describe the—both actual and metaphoric—low point of a function or process. As the point directly below the camera or satellite on the earth’s surface, the nadir is particularly relevant for the creation of accurate or seemingly distortion-free maps.
Every two-dimensional representation of space involves a distortion. The visualization of surfaces is only possible by means of a standardized form of it, yet always also represents a fictionalization of space and scale.
For the work Nadir, Kolling addresses this Cartesian contradiction by constructing the flight path as a single, self-contained image that has no beginning or end and is only brought into the space via the sectional projection (of flatness). The work is screened using a modified projector and is embedded in an expansive intervention that constricts the proportions of the Kunstverein’s exhibition space. In this way, the spatial characteristics are exaggerated and shifted, necessitating a repositioning of the visitors.
In his exhibition “Nadir,” Paul Kolling devotes himself to the impossible task of documenting the world. In attempting to achieve this, the images of the actual places are subjected to a reductive abstraction, which is necessary in order to be able to depict the complexity of the world in a two-dimensional image.
This loophole built into the photographic method is at the center of the exhibition at Kunstverein München. The ability to read—or more precisely the “literacy” of—such images as an acquired cultural technique of society still shapes our view of/on the world today.
at Kunstverein München
until April 21, 2024