Biografia
Karen Stuke has always wanted to engage in the “other”, an “absolute” theater photography. In other words, an image which unites everything, the entire scene, the entire act, the entire program. Thus she inevitably came to the camera obscura, an anachronistically slow instrument, which allows just such a view and with which she is meanwhile so intimate that she doesn’t even consider it anything special – so masterly is her perfection of this tool. The images she records with it are “different” – this much is irrefutable. Whether they are proper and “correct” is unverifiable. They are the visible expression of a deep desire to respond to the extravagant world of the theatre with extravagant photographic images. Her production is doubled and even tripled. The artist responds to the production on stage with the production of the camera, which follows the production of the image in stagelike boxes. A new system of images is created.
In her series “City Lights” Karen Stuke not only employs light as a scenic aid, but as a generative instance, producing autonomous image structures. The works rarely bring objects to mind and even their method of production retreats to the background. However, the dimension of movement is not hidden to the well-informed eye, forming a pattern of explanation and a constant within the visual game of the travelling photographer. Here she is the one in motion. She installs her camera in lofty rotating towers, which are often furnished with chic restaurants high above the cosmopolitan cities of the world, such as Berlin, New York or Kobe, Japan, where they lead a dizzy and vertiginous existence. With an unlimited view into the depths, the stationary lights of the large city flash by. The picture is constantly changing. But we are actually the ones that are changing and moving. The photo eye remains calm. It simply records at its own discretion, allowing a singular image to be created over space and time within its hollow cavity. The impression is no less true, good or beautiful than our own. Merely different.
