- Venue
- Cornerhouse
- Location
- North West England
The three prints that make up Gregor Neurer’s New Tenant (2001) piece depict empty domestic environments, capturing the subtle marks left behind where we can only imagine furniture once stood. The aesthetic is minimal but the dark traces, of this piece and the projection, Dedicated to the Neighbours (2000), intimately document an absence of human activity which, through its very absence, becomes overwhelmingly present. The title, New Tenant, reveals the element of transition and the fact that what we see is just an empty in-between moment after one tenant moves out, and the next moves in. The emptiness suggested is one (metaphorically) larger than the size of the room itself: it engages with more than just a physical emptiness but also emptiness in relation to a once full space and the memory of this full space. The movement of people and their objects, the events of the past and future within that space are also present through their absence. What Neuerer, and the audience, sees is the physical trace of this memory. The prints lean against the wall on the floor of the gallery, just to the side of the entrance which suggests they – as objects rather than the images they depict – are also part of this temporary world of objects in spaces, more specifically the temporary nature of the gallery space. I was left wondering what traces they would leave behind at the end of this exhibition.Silence would be poignant here – the interior prints are pregnant with silence – but I was vaguely aware of familiar songs playing at the other end of the gallery. The noise was the sound track to Sissi Farassat’s film Sissi, c’est moi and broke the underlying tension often experienced in galleries. The film is of the female artist on a moving platform in an original setting of a peep show. Like her other works, it makes the viewer realise they have been purposely placed in the role of the voyeur. In Untitled (2007), a series of Polaroids depict the artist from a distance in intimate, domestic situations. She appears self-consciously feminine, part dressed and applying make-up in some instances, and these secret photos are never un-flattering. She appears as I imagine a woman would want to appear if she were to be spied upon, revealing that the artist has created this image of femininity. The audience is forced to wonder whether they should be seeing such private moments yet is simultaneously aware they were created to be viewed. The less explicit images, Wer ist das? and Wer steht (2007), raise more questions. Only the outlines of women can be seen, stitched onto the reverse of a photograph, like memories of memories. They draw attention to the superficial nature of photographs as accurate documentations of women, reducing them to just a shape: we are left with but a trace of the notion of ‘woman’.
