ALL PRECONCEPTIONS COLLAPSE records Sabine Schründer’s attempt to see and communicate contexts and scenes without preconceptions. Mindful of photography’s narrative imperative, her images are presented in a manner to thwart the reader from ‘grasping’ their content.
The publication is a selection from Schründer’s works over the past decade; these images accord with her particular criteria relating to expectation, habits of seeing, undoing associations and freeing images from a context. The artist intentionally leaves no hidden clues or strategy to decode. Everything must be interrogated in her endeavor to illustrate something beyond the visible surface. Wherever the reader may momentarily find orientation, be that location, visual or thematic, they are likely to lose it again soon afterwards. Schründer’s images seem to offer an outsider view and they have neither horizons nor clear geographic identifiers. Interleaved semi-transparent grids represent the extension of this way of thinking and posit the possibility of a free thinking space where a location cannot be fixed. The scale of these grids also varies, and in so doing influences the images below – another puzzle that is not resolved.
Our familiar tools for reading or creating association lead to dead ends. Looking at this publication, printed on magazine-quality paper that equally rejects the gravitas and fixedness of a more – literally – weighty publication, the reader is encouraged to suspend their desire to understand and to embrace the potential in the question ‘What is this?’
76 pages, 21.6 × 21.6 cm, softcover, Kodoji Press (Baden).