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Christian Danielewitz is a multimedia artist and writer whose work revolves around different architectures of representation; the television studio, the museum display and the public monument among others. The notions of origin, authenticity and translation (linguistically as well as materially) are of central concern. Most of the objects Danielewitz has collected, while travelling in Afghanistan, the Congo or North Korea, have been casted, copied or otherwise mediated in various idiosyncratic materials. Images are shot on analogue film in one part of the world, developed and re-photographed with digital camera in another part of the world. The question is: what can these altered objects and images mean to their detached audience?

A new series of images deals with the non-representational, the arguably most important legacy of modernism. With references to the seminal work of several celebrated painters of the 20th century, Danielewitz arranges bits and pieces of analogue film, cut from rolls already exposed in different (contested) geographies around the world. In the digital age, the age of photoshop, it has become increasingly difficult to assert the authenticity of photographic images, i.e. their relation to "reality". One could argue, that there is more "truth" in the physical gesture of a brushstroke (or, in the case of Lucia Fontana, the slitting of a canvas ), than in the intangible pixels that make up a digital image. Recognizing that photography comes after representational painting, and that nonfigurative painting comes after photography, the series A succession of modern gestures, adapted, revisits this particular relationship between painting and photography.

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