KATHARINA STRUBER | COMMON PRACTICE

Exhibition opening: Thursday, 13th November 2014, 6 pm
Galerie Michaela Stock, Schleifmühlgasse 18, 1040 Vienna

Katharina Struber's new series "COMMON PRACTICE" focuses on cooperative processes, on creative ones such as theatre and orchestra rehearsals or sportive ones such as the training session of a water polo team.

Shots taken with a video camera form the basis for digital picture processing that condenses time and motion sequences into large-scale photo tableaux. Photography serves as the base for composing a digital image out of a several-hour long video material. It overrides the confinement to time and renders non-verbal communication structures between the actors visible by the technique of lagged recording.

Common practice is the core of collective action and each individual actor contributes, to various degrees of intensity, to the entire dynamics, the process and the result. This becomes quite evident in the recordings of an orchestra rehearsal of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the experimental group "Theater Combinat", the actionist group Fuckhead, as well as in the training sessions of a water polo team. The balance between each of the single individuals and the palpable energy of common practice are elucidated in the photographic tableaux of Katharina Struber. On the one hand, the facets of simultaneous action flow into a spacious overall image of the entire ensemble, on the other hand, however, they may be considered as autonomous, yet particulate views of one unique, comprehensive composition.