About Gudrun Barenbrock’s video works

By Bettina Pelz

lowlights – video installation for GLOW Eindhoven

More than the material world Gudrun Barenbrock emphasizes the visual anchor points of light as one of the possible focuses of human perception. In her videos, what seems to be abstract and without recognizable order is the documentation of a non-conventional visual approach to a reality that is usually defined and limited by visual traditions. Her works target urbanity, showing urban landscapes such as traffic or architecture as light phenomenä In the composition of her video installations she projects these streams of light through semi-transparent free-hanging screens into darkened architectural spaces, thereby exploring the interplay of volume and space, form and motion, direction and dynamics, colour and light in relation to human perception.

daheim – video installation for LichtRouten Lüdenscheid

Visual perception is a dynamic process that can be characterised by the unceasing succession of sensory impressions. Gudrun Barenbrock pursues this perception process with the camera, photographing and filming light and backlighting, shade and reflection. The result is pictures in which the surfaces and objects serving as imaging and reflection surfaces disappear. Nothing remains as a clue to the specific place where the photos were taken. She documents not what endures, but instead the transient – traces of light, movement and dissolution. And although the correlations with empirical reality are greatly reduced, her pictures nevertheless reveal “meaning” (Roland Barthes). Her installations subject the visible reality manifested in the pictures to artistic reflection.

Gudrun Barenbrock has photographed and filmed light and backlighting in urban settings for her LichtRouten 2010 pieces. This projected pictorial material becomes an aura of colour and form moving through the space, decomposing on semi-transparent projection surfaces installed in the space and creating a pulsating continuum.

(Bettina Pelz was curator of GLOW Eindhoven/NL 2008 and LichtRouten Lüdenscheid/D 2010)