Emoplux

Since the 1990s Arno Gisinger develops a multidisciplinary form of artistic expression that combines photography and historiography. Inspired by the German way of thinking of the Interwar period and the methodologies of the Nouvelle Histoire, his projects offer a contemporary reinterpretation of the locations or non-locations of memory. His works challenge the visual representation of the past across different forms and figures : witnesses, objects, places or images. The function of the archive, document status and the literary dimension of speech lie at the heart of his artistic concerns.
His work Konstellation Benjamin, constructed in collaboration with philosopher and historian Nathalie Raoux as a work in progress, retraces the European exile of German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940). In this work Arno Gisinger portrays images of precise locations that this man of letters has frequented, layered over the correspondence Benjamin maintained at the time.
Konstellation Benjamin is a constellation of the present and the past, of photography and historical research, of text and image. It asks the question of how to provide justice in a way that is true to Benjamin to the thinker of the loss of aura and of the politicisation of the aesthetic.
The installation of the work is made to measure for each exhibition and bears an ephemeral character by its means of production : inkjet prints fixed directly on the walls of the gallery.