Laura Schawelka: Permanent Set

With Permanent Set, Laura Schawelka is presenting her fourth solo show at FILIALE.

Schawelka’s artistic strategy starts with various images and reproductions, the (flawed) thrust of which reveals the idiosyncratic process behind their production, translating them into photographs, videos and installations. In this context she is concerned with the different forms of faulty transmission and imaginary authenticity in various duplication techniques, which expose their methods of production and disrupt our reception of the message conveyed by the medium.

The starting point for Schawelka’s deliberations is a photograph of a detail from an incunabulum dating from 1482, “Reise ins Gelobte Land” by Hans Tucher. Its fallen type reveals the impression of a printing type that accidentally became detached during the printing process and has left an imprint of its exact shape. In the substantive context of the book, it is a mark, this faulty transmission, that provides valuable insights into the circumstances of the relevant reproduction process. The three-dimensional manufacturing process on which the two-dimensional printed matter is based is suddenly revealed. The works Untitled (JD Sports) and Untitled (Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen) manifest comparable extensions: As advertising photographs, they provide unintentional and somewhat random insights into their production context and a certain staging of their own production, abstract in the way they reflect a flash in golden beads or even reflect the photo studio.