When Anita Witek now transfers her photographic puzzle into real space and extends it to an installative pictorial space by spreading large-format pieces of paper made of advertising posters over complete gallery walls and floors, someone is pushed into the centre of attention who has previously only constituted themselves outside the image: the observer themselves. If their spatial perception was previously mainly on the imagined space or on the space they “projected” into the picture and perceived as separate from themselves, now the physical experience of the current space weaves itself into the perception and causes events within and outside the image to fall into one another. It simultaneously becomes the subject and object of observation and allows its relationship to the self and the world to be explored afresh. Standing in the collage space, no definite, sovereign viewer standpoint can be discerned any longer. On the contrary, a walkway leading around the installation makes it possible to position oneself simultaneously both inside and outside the installation and to adopt a distanced as well as a close-up view. In a similar way to the photo-collages, here the viewer is confronted with a heterogeneous perception situation. If the alternation between the illusion and disillusioning of spatial depth actually takes place here on the surface, and thereby in the imagined space, the “projected” (image) space in the space collage changes into in the actual physical space. Anita Witek thereby anchors the observer both in the present at the same time as she constantly questions their habits of seeing and perception: here and where you are.

Fiona Liewehr

translated by David Westacott

Excerpt from ‘Radical change in the projected (image) space’, 2014

 

 

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Installation View, “Hier und wo du bist”, Marenzi Gallery, Leibnitz, 2014

Photo: Gregor Neuerer