BACKGROUND

MOVEMENT AND TRANSFORMATION

The artist duo KOSCHIES creates a new reality situated within a time continuum between photography and film. In contrast to conventional cameras, the special cameras used for this purpose are not equipped with mechanical shutters. The picture is taken through a permanently opened narrow slit, exposed “seamlessly” in one single constant movement.

Everything immobile and still is either not visible in the pictures, or only reproduced as deformed beyond recognition; it appears as a continuous stripe or line. In contrast, everything moving in front of the slit and corresponds to the camera’s recording speed is depicted figuratively – as a sequence of what has passed through the recording slit.

A temporal succession becomes a spatial juxtaposition.

 

THE CHRONISTIC PERSPECTIVE

The works of the artist couple are visualisations of the fourth dimension. Photographs that at first glance appear to be photographically captured static moments actually depict continuously flowing time. Thus, spaces of time are being revealed in the most literal meaning of the term.

Even superficially familiar-looking motifs question the usual three-dimensional perception on closer inspection. “Reading” the images requires a detachment from a purely spatial perspective. While conventional photographs commonly only document a short sliver of time and depict a scene in height and width, the pictures taken by the KOSCHIES with time-slit cameras retain the spatial dimension of height, and the width is replaced by the axis of time.

The horizontal extension becomes the chronistic perspective.

 

STAGINGS IN THE SPACE OF TIME

The suspended states of the persons depicted, the doublings and deformations are not based on digital manipulation. This applies equally to shadows, some of which fall in different directions in the same picture or behave differently from the associated persons. Irritations and distortions are caused by the influence of time itself which the KOSCHIES’ artistically instrumentalise while documenting its passing.

The content and aesthetics of the pictures refer to the simultaneity as well as the dynamism of Futurism; they also refer to Surrealist models and the partial deformations in the works of Francis Bacon.

In many works, time, now perceived as an “empty” static surface, dominates. Its predominance relativises human greatness and creates a distinct, sometimes alienating atmosphere of emptiness and vulnerability.

 

E. Schumann

All becoming is based on movement,
for space itself is a temporal concept.

Paul Klee