Tangenziale

Press release / Exhibition / Galleria Estro 2005
Text: Chiara Sartori
Translation: Sunniva Greve

 

Jens Lüstraeten was born in 1973 in Krefeld/Germany and began studying photography at the FH Bielefeld in 1996.
In 1999 he attended the Kunstakademie Leipzig, where he studied artistic photography and new media under Prof. Joachim Brohm. It was here that he began his exploration of the borders between photography and video.

 

He produced photography-like long-term video installations that combined a fixed position of the composition with the gradual play-back of motion sequences. In this way he brings together the basic features of photography, such as static image and standstill of time, and elements such as the movement and time perception of the video medium.

 

Works like boat one and two (2000), Marghera (2002) and Fireworks (2003) have been shown, for example, in Colexio de Arquitectos de Galicia, in Fotomuseum Winterthur and in the Barakk Gallery in Berlin.

 

Apart from the subject matter of medium, most topics in Lüstraeten’s work deal with “man-altered landscape”, transit spaces, and the emergence and meanings of urban spaces.
The three-part video installation TANGENZIALE, the work with which Jens Lüstraeten obtained his degree in 2004 at the HGB Leipzig, condenses his thematic and visual approaches. Static, almost stage-like night images of anonymous infrastructure in the form of highway feeder roads, industrial plants, parking spaces and landsape details combine with tracking shots of this same periphery.

 

Bearing the title TANGENZIALE in mind, the first impression of these images suggests that the work is a visual description of a specific place – possibly somewhere in Italy.
On the other hand, the permanent orange light of the street lamps, the absence of any geographical bearings to allow for localization, and the constant repetition of some of the motifs portray what appears to be an anonymous exchangeable space. In the interaction with tracking shots, which show constant movement but never a point of arrival, the work contradicts the specific place reference in the title, engaging instead with the principle of place, a modus operandi, a construct.