Annette Kisling : Photography

“Mobiliar 2”
pigment piezo print
68.6 x 67.6 cm
2005

“Les Vitrines 18”
pigment piezo print
30 x 20 cm
2008

“Mobiliar 3”
pigment piezo print
58 x 48 cm
2005

Annette Kisling
‘Accesso’ Exhibition
Galerie Kamm, Berlin
2011

Annette Kisling is a Berlin-based photographer whose work coolly examines the facades — the visual fronts — certain places present to the world. She usually works in black and white and organizes her photographs into series or suites. Her photos often isolate certain architectural features of nondescript or peripheral places: industrial buildings and glum little parks in Berlin, shuttered storefronts in Paris or Rotterdam, brick walls and cobbled streets in what could be any European city.

Kisling’s pictures aren’t documentary in nature; the impulse behind them is not to record what is. She doesn’t make portraits of places. Instead she establishes typologies, discovering patterns of visual affinity and variation in places one might not expect to find them. Kissling lingers in places that weren’t meant to be lingered in, looking hard at things one usually passes by.

There’s no attempt to get these places to divulge their secrets. It’s the surfaces that she’s interested in. The absence of people, the stark black and white with its rich modulations of grey, the sense of mute or stony facade — these give the pictures the feelings of sets. There are traces of human activity: graffiti, shreds of poster, awkward storefront signs. Whatever that activity was, it’s over now. The facades remain – inaccessible, dumb, gazing blankly back at the viewer. [Extract : Chinati Foundation]

Annette Kisling : Galerie Kamm

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