Festival website launch
Anna Polke Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the festival website Productive Image Interference as part of the anniversary project realised by the Anna Polke Foundation on the occasion of Sigmar Polke’s 80th birthday in 2021.
Following an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which brought together works by Sigmar Polke with works by current artists Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Max Schulze, Avery Singer, the Festival links Polke’s work to current visual and media discourses.
In an age of fake news based on image manipulation, virtual reality, and an infinite visual cosmos of increasingly ubiquitous JPEGs and GIFs, it has become clear to us that we cannot trust our eyes. We are quite aware that the images that surround us do not depict reality as much as play a decisive role in forging it—including transmission errors, loss of quality, hacks, and other glitches. While Sigmar Polke was studying at Düsseldorf Art Academy during the early 1960s, he was soon drawn to the imagery that was circulating on television and in newspapers, the mass media of the day. Transference and interference, as well as the transforming and recoding of imagery, including the visual glitches that resulted or were exposed during the process, became an early trademark of his Rasterbilder, works based on the halftone printing technique. This Productive Image Interference subsequently remained a central instrument and motif in all Polke’s work, in which anything and everything could become a material for art: from comics, a printing error in a newspaper, to an ornamental element by Albrecht Dürer.
When considering the technological developments enabling a simple processing and sharing of imagery from a wide range of sources that has become ubiquitous today, it is hardly surprising that Polke’s unique approach to imagery remains a source of inspiration for both current artistic practices and visual discourses.
With contributions by: Taslima Ahmed, Svetlana Chernyshova, Bice Curiger, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Alexander Kluge, Franziska Kunze, Doreen Mende, Sandra Neugärtner, Dietmar Rübel, Magnus Schäfer, Daniel Spaulding, Kerstin Stakemeier, Michael Trier and students of the Marxt class (formerly Odenbach) at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The contributions by international scholars and artists explore the potential of image interference in the work of Sigmar Polke and current artistic production.
The festival was planned as an in-person event from November 25–27, 2021 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, but had to be canceled due to the corona pandemic.
The anniversary project is taking place under the auspices of Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, Minister for Culture and Science in North-Rhine Westphalia, and supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science in North-Rhine Westphalia, Kunststiftung NRW, and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.
Artistic Directors: Kathrin Barutzki and Nelly Gawellek (Anna Polke Foundation)
