Februar

SUBVERSIVENESS

Art and sound performance by Peter Kraus

THE INJURED IMAGE

The work of Peter Kraus is focused on disfunctionality, damage and decay in their relations to time and the subjectivity of viewer’s perception. The degradation of the material matter in still image puts an image onto an invisible timeline, bringing past, future and the passing of time itself into a captured momentum. As degradation references the viewer to such ultimate temporary conditions as death and birth the timeline becomes rooted in infinity.

In the works of Peter Kraus decay constitutes a parallel existential substance, immersed into everyday reality. With Europe having had a long artistic tradition of romanticizing decay as a condition of wholesome reality, Peter Kraus is focused on fragmentation as a key aspect of contemporary visual and mental Zeitgeist. The modern fragmentation deprives our subjectivity of a romantic viewpoint on decay, but gives us a gift of a sober and distant look at deterioration “as is”.

The “Injured Image” represents a special twist in this approach as the artist makes an attempt to turn the distant and non-empathetic look to a new decayed subject matter. THE INJURED IMAGE can be read ambivalently as an image of an injury and an injury of an image that is unable to capture the infinite reality but is constantly striving to do so. As we look at the injury the injury is looking at us and we are all immersed into a longer sequence of time that goes far beyond what is seen.

ELENA LWUDVARSKA Independend author and filmmaker from moscow