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Sound
Barrier, Schöppingen 1996
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Témoigner,
Mathias Flügge (german)
Le sommeil de la raison, Joseph
Tarrab (german)
Victims in the Shadow of Account
– A Story Behind the Pictures of Salah Saouli,
Harald Friecke
Nur ein Hauch von Verlust, Katrin
Bettina Müller
The Way We’ve Always Done
Before, Michael Wollenheit
Energetic Depots – On the
New Works of Salah Saouli, Stefan
Rasche (german)
Some say that writing poetry is
impossible after Auschwitz, Wilhelm
Gauger
Wir wollen wieder gesehen werden
und euch sehen können, Wilhelm
Gauger
Le mot secret, Abbas
Beydoun
Obsession by Salah Saouli,
Heleen
Buijs
Supperpositions, Reiner
Höynck (german)
Das Labyrinth, Stefan
Rasche
Stefan Rasche
"Energetic Depots – On the New Works of Salah
Saouli”
Filled with individual experiences and collective images,
memory is a repository of disparate, unsorted data,
an arena of changing perspectives and alliances. To
activate it beyond its own structure, to give it a surface
or a volume in order to grasp equally the definiteand
the indefinite,visibleandinvisible,isatthecenterofSalahSaouli’sartisticinterest.Withthe
obsession of an archaeologist he has over the past several
years collected photographs, texts and other documents,
to incorporate them into his multimedial objects and
installations as fragmented material – often at
the brink of legibility. Printed on flagsorhousedinshrine-likeencasings,
mounted on the wall, arranged in display cabinets or
staged in spacious labyrinths, these remains, which
have been recovered and reproduced complement one another
across the individual works to comprise a visual depot
which– complete with cracks and gaps, as well
as thematic repetitions – is repeatedly excerpted
and combined anew. Salah Saouli prefers to work with
complex montages and multidimensional overlappings,
with ways of focusing and renewed diffusion, to lend
his material energetic form and associative significancewithoutforegroundingits
origin or historical places and times. In particular,
it is the effects of war on people and cities that Salah
Saouli has invoked as images of recollection, by using
images of destroyed buildings or photos of missing persons.
In the exhibition in Schöppingen he has developed
this theme, and found new forms of presentation. He
taps into the recent history of Münster, for example,
in his use of the jet fighter:thecommunitytherehasbeenharassedforyearsbylow-flyingjetsfrom
a nearby NATO air base. Inspired by and yet detached
from this specificcontexttheartistunderlines the image
of the military machine in its traumatizing effects
by printing its silhouette hundreds of times onto transparent
panels, which are then installed like a squadron across
the expanse of a wall or into the entire exhibition
space. Airplanes and other motifs also filldrawersto
overflowing,whichSaoulihashungfromtheceilingorgroupedontheflooraslightboxes.Here
the repository of diverse memorabilia functions as a
metaphor for the structures of memory. The more kinetic
works of the artist possess a similar referential quality,
as they set images in motion with the help of propellers
or projectors, allowing them to appear and disappear.
Each of the motifs, for instance a coat of arms or a
medieval torture scene, a holy figureoragainanapproaching
airplane, can only be deciphered as a fragment, as a
fleetingsilhouette–butitistheir momentum that
guarantees the integrity of the images that the artist
intends. In this way, Salah Saouli transcends the actual
display to bring what seems to be past through recognition
and reconsideration to an immediate presence and contemporary
meaning.
Salah Saouli in Schöppingen, Catalogue 1996from
German by Alisa kotmair
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