“People now nothing of their subconscious desires.”
Where they are now building on the ‘boiler’ was the gate to the Zone in the film ‘Stalker’ by Andrei Tarkovski. In the industrial estate between Old Narva and Leningrad Avenues all the trips using the flatbed railway truck were filmed. At the bridge over the River Pirita the flatbed truck halted, that’s where they got off and headed in a northerly direction. The Zone itself started in the riverbed of the Pirita. There were four tanks standing there that looked as if they’d been destroyed, a few machine guns and a couple of armoured vehicles. On top of one a soldier’s skeleton was placed behind a machine gun. This was the world of the Stalker where none of the soldiers dared to enter any further.
Ulrich Polster is not an artist whose works aim to please. His video projections
would hardly pass as decorative tapestries of sound, but demand rather to be
penetrated by the viewer, which may well add up to a laborious work process.
As is true of his latest pieces, two of which he will be showing at the gallery:
the 3-channel video projection “Shaoxing Lu”, and the 1-channel video projection
“Auslöschung” [= Extinction].
And what scenes: typically mysterious, darkly glowing, full of drama, seemingly
so full of life. And yet these are but dances pointing to the mortality of our
being.
This text has not been translated yet
Nähe und Distanz, Meditation und Analyse – das sind zwei Gegensatzpaare, die mir
spontan einfallen, wenn ich darüber nachdenke, was mich an Ulrich Polsters
künstlerischer Arbeit fasziniert.
Erzählstränge werden gebrochen und markieren philosophisches Terrain. Tempi
werden überraschend gewechselt und assoziieren kompositorische Strategien. Und
die dem dokumentarischen Element stets verbundene Ebene bewegter Bilder wird
angehalten zugunsten eines poetischen Schwebezustandes.
This text has not been translated yet
Der Videokünstler Ulrich Polster kombiniert sparsame Bilder zum großen Panorama: Das Leben
Nichts besonderes eigentlich, antwortet Ulrich Polster lapidar auf die Frage, was er vor dem Kunststudium in Leipzig gemacht habe. “So die klassische DDR-Karriere: Einen Beruf gelernt, Nachrichtentechniker; kurz in dem Beruf gearbeitet, aufgehört, verschiedene Jobs gemacht, Bratwürste zur Messe verkauft, im Museum Ausstellungen auf und ab gebaut und als Aufsicht gearbeitet, Straße gekehrt. Und mich nebenbei autodidaktisch mit Kunst beschäftigt.”
Ulrich Polster’s medium of choice is large-scale video installation1. His subject matter is the dissolution of spaces of social interaction and of constructions of identities and political meanings. His methodology is one of choreographed editing — a fragmentation of bodies and their capacity to act, a strictly rhythmical dissection not only of real spaces, but also visual or sonic architectures, an — at times imperceptible — interweaving of diverging time axes and horizons of remembrance.
All of the milestone in cinema history have derived their energy from a basic contradiction. Amid public proclamations of the greatest possible intimacy, they realize what in effect are impossibilities. By practicing exhibitionism they simultaneously create protective spheres for what is private and personal. Authentic films always act for this reason as accumulators of what are actually incompatible spheres. And through this they realize their utopias. From the profanity of our involuntarily experienced here and now, cinema is able thanks to its specific means of reflection to create something new, a third reality. In the ideal case this media-bound space emancipates from its author, creates a sphere of its own between so-called genuine reality and the apparatus for its intellectual mastery.
A text about the work of Ulrich Polster
Everything occurs as if Ulrich Polster had the means to transversally apprehend different image arrangements1: something similar to an imperceptible step to the side that allows him to talk to us about images of here, from a standpoint somewhere else.
Born in 1963 in Frankenberg, in the G.D.R., he belongs to that generation of artists from Eastern Germany who had to deal with the economic, cultural and aesthetic downfall provoked by the fall of the Soviet Empire and the opening of this other Europe to the West. Following a preliminary assimilation period of western proposals and the wearing out of the novelty effect, this generation of creators came to redefine their own aesthetic heritage, a movement that can now offer an original look at contemporary visual material.
Ulrich Polster Biography 2023 - 2024 Culture Moves Europe, EU work scholarship, Tbilisi, Georgien 2019 Work stay Ukrainia 2017 Scholarship, Deutsche Akademie Rom, Casa Baldi 2016 Work stay in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2013 - 2014 Work stay, Baltic States 2011 Scholarship, Saxonia 2010 Operare competition for realisation, Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin 2008 Work stay China (Shanghai, Xingjiang) 2007 Work stay Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania
Notturno III / Material is a 2-channel video installation, perceived during my stay in Italy at Casa Baldi/Olevano. After Notturno I (2013) and Notturno II (2017), the first two parts of an autobiographically tainted trilogy about aesthetic impressions embedded into the horizon of contemporary history, Notturno III / Material will give insight into the invention of images and the backgrounds of my way of operation. It will form the starting point of the closing part of the trilogy.
Ulrich Polster Solo Exhibitions (selected) 2024 TIMELOOPS I, B-U-S, Tbilisi 2023 MAMUKA IS COMING, B-U-S, Tbilisi 2019 ABSENCE, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, sound installation: Boris Vogeler 2017 MADE IN USA (II), Gallery Bossenanger, Chemnitz 2015 STALKER MATERIAL, Neue Sächsische Galerie, Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Chemnitz, music: Boris Vogeler, curator: Mathias Lindner 2014 MADE IN USA, Wild West Activ Space, Maastricht 2013 SHAOXING LU, Westwerk, Hamburg, music: Boris Vogeler 2013 NOTTURNO (2013), Gallery Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
The complexity of this exhibition [Trouble with Realism] and its mental correlations might best be condensed in this short video by Ulrich Polster. For a few minutes we see, greetings from Claude Monet, a heystack. Wether we are looking at a freeze frame or a cinematic shot is hard to tell. One thinks to observe how haze scraps are slightly moving, but this might be as well an illusion. This reference to art history is broken up by the title of this work: Bosnia and Herzegovina (Han Pijesak, Republika Srpska, 07.08.2007).
Ulrich Polster, who grew up in the GDR during the era of the Cold War, has traced out his aesthetic influences in his single channel projection Notturno. The artist approaches his video pieces from a painterly angle and finds it very important to convey their visual presence to the full. For this reason he decided to project the work onto a Perspex surface.
For all the ironic signals that are scattered throughout the work, the artist is in fact extremely serious when it comes to the core of socialist modernism.
Seven monitors transmit excerpts from television reports on the Yugoslav wars, the ten-day war in Slovenia in June 1991, and the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. For his work, Polster recorded relevant repeats of the German news program Die Tagesschau twenty years later, as transmitted by digital station tagesschau24 (still named ARD EinsExtra until 2012). He selected the reports on Yugoslavia from roughly 200 hours of material to present them in a condensed montage on all seven monitors simultaneously.
Ulrich Polster Film Festivals/Projects (selected) 2024 Previews Kurorti, Tbilisi, TIMELOOPS, ARARAT 2024 Identity Salaam Cinema, Baku, NOTTURNO I / II 2024 Identity DDD Kunsthouse, Jerevan, MISH, sound: Christine Scherrer, ARARAT 2023 Freedom Artarea Tbilisi, FRACHT, composition: Thomas Ch. Heyde 2019 “Stalker - Film und Ausnahmezustand”, Akademie der Künste, Berlin Stalker Material 2018 “10 Jahre Video at Midnight” Kino Babylon, Berlin FRACHT, composition: Thomas Ch. Heyde 2017 Villa Massimo, Rom, NOTTURNO I&II, NOTTURNO MATERIAL
“People now nothing of their subconscious desires.”
Where they are now building on the ‘boiler’ was the gate to the Zone in the film ‘Stalker’ by Andrei Tarkovski. In the industrial estate between Old Narva and Leningrad Avenues all the trips using the flatbed railway truck were filmed. At the bridge over the River Pirita the flatbed truck halted, that’s where they got off and headed in a northerly direction. The Zone itself started in the riverbed of the Pirita. There were four tanks standing there that looked as if they’d been destroyed, a few machine guns and a couple of armoured vehicles. On top of one a soldier’s skeleton was placed behind a machine gun. This was the world of the Stalker where none of the soldiers dared to enter any further.
There are streams of images that are reminiscent of Yogic manuals without the tinge of esotericism, looking rather like relaxation therapies that would have been stripped of their didactic undertones. The three-channel video projection Unstern [Disaster] by Ulrich Polster (visuals) and Christine Scherrer (sound) is arguably the most disturbing and simultaneously well-tempered exploration of remoteness to come out of Germany in recent months. Spectators embark on a journey through time and space, only to sense the gut-wrenching, mind-numbing horror of distant worlds insidiously taking hold of them.
Ulrich Polster Catalogues (selected) Andrej Tarkowski. Stalker - Film und Ausnahmezustand, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2021 10 Jahre Videoart at Midnight, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld, 2020 Roter Oktober, NEUE SÄCHSISCHE GALERIE, Chemnitz, 2017 Weiter So, Potsdam, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstraum Potsdam, 2017 MORE TO COME, Hannover, Revolver Publishing, Berlin 2016 TELE GEN, Bonn, Hirmer Verlag 2015 STALKER / MATERIAL,NEUE SÄCHSISCHE GALERIE, Chemnitz, 2015 Lichtfest 2014, “25 Jahre nach der Friedlichen Revolution”, LTM GmbH, Leipzig 2014
On 1 May 1981 of all days Andrei Tarkovsky‘s movie Stalker opened in some cinemas in the GDR. The news of this curious, cryptic, philosophical and in every respect unusual work spread like wildfire in the circles of people seeking ways out of the intellectual dilemma of everyday existence under really existing socialism. How was this possible? The fact that it was from the Soviet Union of all places that a film reached us that struck these hidden chords in us? Because the amazing thing was that we immediately felt at home in this apparently hermetically sealed world of the Zone. This was by no means because occasionally in common parlance the GDR was still called the Zone! This banal connection didn‘t even occur to us. Rather it appears as if through this film sentiments were formulated that had long slumbered within us, as if through the Stalker more or less dormant images were being awakened. It is quickly said that a single work of art could be in a position to characterise a whole generation. There it would first have to be clarified how this generation is to be defined. Nevertheless, it appears to me that such a characterisation exists here. There was life before Stalker. And there was a different one afterwards.
JOURNEY
Everything starts with an image – and it will also end with this image. What expands in between to a 39-minute 7-channel video projection is a stream of associations, interpretations and effects derived from it. An extremely subjective world of images carries you off, not unlike its cinematic model, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, after a train journey into a ZONE which can never be exactly comprehended behind the image and between the images. And there everything is not just what it appears to be. Strange explanations, rapid tracking shots and many quite, often idyllic moments carry us off into a world where the resigned weariness of knowing the score, of always having seen everything before is no longer valid, Because perception becomes questionable. What is it that is to be seen there?
“The machine-gun-man on the … motorcycle.” The projection opens with words from the contemporary witness Arvo Iho, the only comprehensible speech in the video installation. The former intern on the set bears witness in this way to the starting point of Polster’s video – the former locations of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In the course of the 40 minutes Polster will modify additional typical Tarkovsky scenes and ambiances/environments: the train trip and the waterfall, the large areas of fog, fire, landscapes full of ruins. For Tarkovsky the aesthetic point of departure was always the idea for a movie, the tale of a character with its insoluble captivity in time. He sought cinematic images which follow a poetic logic because they are based on observation: “In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.” (Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 1984, eng. University of Texas reprint 1986, p. 20)