Rudi Weissbeck

interrobang

interro-bang

Installation, site-specific intervention,
books, leporello, text, publication

‚interrobang‘ explores multiple ways in which I have worked and presented my photographic and artistic work.

It deals with my experiences during a six month stay in Israel and presents these in an open narrative. The themes of my own privilege and the experience of seeing other people suffer were on the forefront of my mind.

The work takes on different forms depending on the location, often featuring a single lambda exposure and adjacent wall calendar, a leporello, a newspaper, a book, fairy lights, and laminate. These small publications combine images, text, fragments, stories, and lines from self-written movie scripts.

The book version of this work has received the german photo book award in silver.

Installation view, Goethe Institut Paris (FR), 5 m, 2018, variable sizes, books printed in Ultrachrome K3, Lambda exposure, fairy lights
Installation view, Goethe Institut Paris (FR), 5 m, 2018, variable sizes, books printed in Ultrachrome K3, Lambda exposure, fairy lights

‚interrobang‘ explores multiple ways in which I have worked and presented my photographic and artistic work.

It deals with my experiences during a six month stay in Israel and presents these in an open narrative. The themes of my own privilege and the experience of seeing other people suffer were on the forefront of my mind.

The work takes on different forms depending on the location, often featuring a single lambda exposure and adjacent wall calendar, a leporello, a newspaper, a book, fairy lights, and laminate. These small publications combine images, text, fragments, stories, and lines from self-written movie scripts.

The book version of this work has received the german photo book award in silver.

Installation view, ‚High Ends‘, Kunstverein Wiesbaden (DE), 2018

What reality are we approaching here? Is that a question or is that an exclamation? A leporello placed on a pedestal, pictures in a newspaper holder, various binders; the photographs, which Rudi Weissbeck presents in a varied manner, were mostly taken during a stay in Israel. The ensemble of images is supplemented by text fragments of everyday narratives that resemble a script. Despite the diversity of forms, the presentation is far from complete; rather, it is an insight into the paradoxical world between tourism and violence, everyday life and conflict zone. The nature of the reality there, this contemporaneousness of actually incompatible worlds of life, is reflected in the artistic principle of montage. Several of the photographs consist of images placed one inside the other, creating shifts and ambiguities. Weissbeck’s work interrobang shows how well beauty and uncertainty can coexist; but especially that this reality is never uniform and above all cannot be grasped in its entirety.

· Hannah Katalin Grimmer for ‚Comment ai-je pu me perdre?‘ at Goethe Institut Paris

Installation view, ‚High Ends‘, Kunstverein Wiesbaden (DE), 2018

Installation view, Isenburger Schloss, Offenbach am Main (DE), 2017

Publication excerpt, Jerusalem Mahane Yehuda Shuk & Window Sign in Eilat

In his work „interrobang,“ Rudi Weissbeck presents a collection of various printed materials, including a leporello, smaller booklets, and larger sheets of paper, displayed on pedestals, shelves, and panel-like on the wall. These compilations allude to the implicit claim of books and newspapers to explain and record the world, summarizing individual „chapters“ of the photographic convolute without attempting to conclude them. Instead, they serve as an associative opening to the photographs, which were taken during a stay in Israel and depict traces of different lifeworlds in an everyday environment that is divided in various senses. The images show drones, leisure worlds, blue skies, impressive nature, and imprinted images of nature on tarps and billboards, creating a real montage of public space that reveals the ambivalence of the places between advertised tourist magnet and political conflict zone. The process of montage runs through the work on several levels, with many photographs being formed from multiple images placed next to and inside each other, resulting in minimal shifts and overlaps. Weissbeck also adds short texts to the pictures, providing hints of everyday stories and encounters, clues to possible contexts, and even elements that seem to come from a screenplay. Isolated misprints with superimposed image and text layers complete the constellation.

Arranged as a series, all the photographs offer a section of the world they are trying to depict, but also add further views and possible perspectives. There is no final overview.

Like a tourist, the artist approaches the foreign country as a guest and at the same time an intruder, trying to open up but never fully leaving the role of visitor. Influenced by media claims and promises, personal fears and longings, the tourist’s gaze is one of selection and exclusion, attempting to capture the characteristics of a place by overlooking certain things, focusing on surfaces and details, and recognizing connections and sensing atmospheres. However, this gaze is also necessarily limited by weariness and preconceptions.

The interrobang, found between the pages, refers to the paradox that the surfaces of the spaces surrounding us seem to become smoother and more slippery the finer we adjust the filters of our perception. The closer we look, the further away things become, and the more impressions we gather, the more aware we become of what we are missing. Beyond the possibility of possession and final comprehension, the deepening of our relationship to our environment reveals itself as a dynamic interplay of approach and distance.

· Dr. Ellen Wagner

Publication excerpt, entrance to the Dolphinarium Disco. On 1 June 2001, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist blew himself up outside the door of this seafront club, killing 21 Israelis, 16 of whom were teenagers.

Publication excerpt, street scene near Aida
refugee camp, Betlehem

Spread of the publication version of ‚interrobang‘, 108 pages, A4, self published, 2019

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