Kunst Licht – To Throw Light upon Labour

Ingmar Stange, Kunst Licht — To Throw Light upon Labour, 2023, Projektion, 4:3, 30 min, Stereo, 2023 © The artist

What does research look like? What performative form can work take?

There is visible and invisible labour.

And labour that is not meant to be seen. The focus is on the visibility of work as a process. The exhibition as a visible form of interaction between the museum and the public comes into focus through a visual document of illustrated research away from public spaces. Research, archiving, installation and restoration – these are the invisible fields of work behind the visible surfaces.

Museums. The visual document is in the tradition of Antje Ehmann’s and Harun Farocki’s project ‘Labour in a Single Shot’ (2011-2014). Kunstlicht – To Throw Light Upon Labour (2023) bears witness to the working process in which the moving image takes on the kinetic narrative. The exhibited episode – The Autopsy of a Painting – deals with the provenance research of a painting by Jacobus Biltius (1633-1681), which was transferred to the SKD collection in the course of a Schlossbergung (castle salvage operation). A Schlossbergung refers to objects and artefacts from castles and manor houses that were expropriated after the Soviet land reform in 1945 and handed over to state institutions such as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. This unlawful appropriation is investigated in provenance research projects and the Compensation Act for Restitution Claims enacted in 1994.

Ingmar Stange was born in Leipzig in 1989. The media scientist, filmmaker and researcher works on the gaps between fictional and documentary narratives. His aim is to show different possibilities of the filmic dispositive. Ingmar graduated from the University of Leipzig with a Master’s degree and with a diploma from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig in Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer’s Expanded Cinema class.