Uncertain Replica

Claudia Hausfeld employs and comments on photography in her work, where questions of reality appear, and historical narratives are placed evenly alongside imaginaries. In her latest work she has dealt with deformations of documentation of historical artifacts, reconstructing them in a poetic manner to produce bent and broken figures. A photograph of a photograph has been enlarged multiple times and printed on A4 pages and glued together, showing a building from an apparently far away location, reminding of the methods we use to survey the past, and how those methods have changed over time. In photographs printed on paper and ceramics, Claudia has broken up a peculiar looking teapot and rearranged it. The painted pattern reminds of veins in wood. In one of the pictures she has removed the teapot from the surface and patched the image up in a computer software, sampling spots from the image and reconstructing the background to fill the void left over. In that manner, as in many other works in this exhibition, we are reminded that repairs often underline what is missing, and the emptiness becomes tangible.

Bjarki Bragason, curator for Munur / The Thing Is
Skaftfell, Seyðisfjörður
2017