Niklas Goldbach

〈Album (cut together – cutting through), HD Video, 124:00, 2020

Niklas Goldbach negotiates the relationship between architecture and necropolitics within their modernist traditions and postmodern manifestations. Predominantly working with video and photography, Goldbach dissects architectural elements and concepts that serve both as backdrops and catalysts of (neo)liberal and (neo)colonial subject construction.
Goldbach presents his video installation Album (cut together – cutting through). Conceived as an ongoing and ever-evolving work, the video amalgamates every single image taken by the artist since 2013 until the very day of its respective future installment in the exhibition. The video’s image sources consciously date back to late 2013, to the precise day that Goldbach initiated his ongoing photographic cycle Permanent Daylight which was presented during Bergen Assembly 2019 and will be again installed during the second exhibition in Stuttgart. While the photographic series is a meticulously edited selection, the video installation inverts this practice and aims toward the polar opposite: by releasing every single image taken with all of the artist’s cameras and by compiling them chronologically for the duration of two frames a second, the over 100,000 images reveal the artistic process behind the selection of that one image. They bare every facet of a contemporary life in pictures by renouncing the distinctions between work and leisure, the public image and the very private image, the documentation of excessive joy and intimate pain. Here, the stream of images activates a stream of consciousness on one’s own ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments, narratives, and images, one’s own celebrations of a time-bound and vulnerable life.