The abandoned sanatorium : With the Minolta Autocord and 22 rolls of Kodak Portra 160 in the eerie ruins (The lost place library. Galerie für Kulturkommunikation ... Galerie für Kulturkommunikation)

Photographs without words…For many years, I have been visiting the abandoned Grabowsee sanatorium near Oranienburg, Brandenburg, at regular intervals.It was the first sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis in the North German Plain and was founded in 1896 by the German Red Cross as a pilot project to test whether sanatorium treatments in the pine forests of Brandenburg were as successful as those in the mountains and by the sea. After World War II, it served as a military hospital from 1945 until the Soviet army withdrew from Germany in 1992. After that, the facility was a popular backdrop for films and photographs for some time, but also for vandals.A few years ago, I visited the sanatorium for the first time, and this visit resulted in the illustrated bookDie Klinik am Grabowsee: 119 Photographien (Edition der Galerie für Kulturkommunikation)which I designed together with my former friend Martina Hellmich. The volume was published by Clemens Koechert Publishing House in Hannover in 2013 and has been completely out of print for many years.You will not find any texts on the subject here; relevant information is easy to find elsewhere and should not inflate this catalog with redundant knowledge, thereby making it expensive. Our favorite critic, Margarete H., a diligent buyer of our catalogs, unfortunately makes this preliminary remark necessary because she has not understood the purpose of the gallery and our projects.Similarly, no further information is provided on the technology used. Perhaps one or two affectionate comments about a particular camera. Nothing more. The gallery takes pictures with whatever it feels like, except for smartphones, which were designed more for monkeys than for humans. Swish swish, scurry scurry. And gone.Hard to believe, but true: this illustrated book generates no profit whatsoever. It costs the gallery money.Please also visit us on the Internet atwww.galerie-fuer-kulturkommunikation.deRainer Strzolka (°1956, Berlin, Germany) makes photos and performances. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Strzolka wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.His photos are given improper functions: significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, he tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. Rainer Strzolka currently lives and works in Oranienburg. Read more