Seit dem in den 90er-Jahren aus­gerufe­nen pic­to­r­i­al turn, der Wende zum Bild, gilt die Cam­era obscu­ra als Aus­gangspunkt ein­er bildlichen Vorstel­lung – für die Kün­st­lerin Bär­bel Möll­mann ist sie das Instru­ment zur Reflex­ion von Wahrnehmung, Zeit und Raum. Die Arbeit ent­stand im ersten Lock­down in Dres­den 2020 in ein­er bege­hbaren Cam­era obscura.

The pan­dem­ic has made the idea of the future even more abstract — and dig­i­tal­iza­tion has made it even more real. The dig­i­tal world and the ana­log world are merg­ing more strong­ly and are in part no longer sep­a­ra­ble. The work “The future is not an exten­sion of the present” attempts to visu­al­ize these two poles.

The motif orig­i­nates from a sin­gle pho­to­graph: the dig­i­tal-look­ing box is a wood­en crate with lumi­nous strips attached to its edges. The light beam on the cen­ter of the box is only pos­si­ble for a brief moment of the cam­era obscu­ra, at the exact moment when the sun shines through the lens. The adjoin­ing series of five small works shows fur­ther details from the cam­era obscu­ra, such as the course of the sun’s light or the play of shad­ows on the floor.

Bär­bel Möll­mannBorn in 1970. Lives and works as a free­lance artist in Düs­sel­dorf. She stud­ied pho­tog­ra­phy and media at the FH Biele­feld with Got­tfried Jäger until 2001. Bär­bel Möll­mann has been work­ing with the cam­era obscu­ra since 1996. In her cur­rent works, she trans­forms rooms into walk-in cam­er­ae obscu­rae. Her works have been shown at the Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art Tokyo and the Goethe-Insti­tut Abu Dhabi, among others.

baerbel-moellmann.de
instagram.com/baerbelmoellmann