Eric Baudelaire at Barbara Wien, Berlin
Barbara Wien, Berlin February 16 – April 13
An afterimage is an impression of an image that the eye retains after visual stimulation has ceased. Eric Baudelaire’s current exhibition at Barbara Wien teems with such images, yet in his work an afterimage seems less a thing the eye retains and more like something the eye could never quite grasp – a ghostly trace that disappears from, or refuses to become, an image. The exhibition assembles a film, photography, silkscreens, a series of heliogravures, and Que Peut une Image (2017), a light-box vitrine of found images and texts organized according to an idiosyncratic alphabet with entries like “N for narcissistic injury” and “P for procedural justice.” V-Blank (2006), a triptych of silver gelatin prints, depicts a glowing television screen resting on the floor amidst a conglomeration of houseplants. The glowing screen calls to mind the question motivating Hiroshi Sugimoto’s iconic series “Theaters”: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? The answer: You get a shining screen. However, while there is a spectacular and even romantic element to Sugimoto’s series, one that emphasizes both the structure of film and the interiors used to view it, Baudelaire’s images possess an emphatic blankness. This atmosphere of isolation and melancholy carries over into the exhibition’s core work, the 2017 feature film Also Known As Jihadi, which tells the story of the jihadi conversion of Abdel Aziz, who disappeared in 2012 to join the al-Nusra Front in Aleppo. Aziz’s radicalization and journey to Syria unfolds through a progression of court documents, written testimony, and seemingly offhand landscape cinematography. The subject himself never appears. Jihadi continues Baudelaire’s cinematographic engagement with Masao Adachi’s concept of fukeiron, or “landscape theory,” which eschews a focus on the subject in favor of the surrounding landscapes, searching for traces of how social forces become embedded within, and visible through, the built environment. Filmed in France, Spain, Algeria, and on the Syrian border in Turkey, Jihadi doesn’t exactly posit specific theories of place, but rather exudes a more generalized atmosphere of aimlessness, rootlessness, and alienation. The film’s many street scenes take on the quality of an echo chamber of sorts; without any tangible visual subject or concrete information about a place to hold onto, we become more attuned to the camera eye itself, which although it adopts the perspective of an individual’s gaze, seems to operate from an empty center.