painted with light /by arvo iho

“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.

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ulrich polster / recent works (2012) /by christoph tannert

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.

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schmale pfade - anmerkungen zur arbeit von ulrich polster /by radjo monk

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.

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Glücklich die Pferde auf ihrer Koppel

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.”

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a point of view here, from elsewhere /by stéphanie katz

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.

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homesick for limbo – observations on ulrich polster’s videos and installations /by claus löser

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.

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breaking the clash /by alexander koch

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.

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