2009
DVCPRO HD, PAL, 0’25 min
Eine schwarzgekleidete Person sprüht einen Lichtkreis vor schwarzem Hintergrund. Bewegung und Kreis stammen aus der Studie über Körperproporionen von Leonardo da Vinci, die dieser nach Vitruv anferigte, um das Innere das Menschen besser zu erforschen. Im Video verschwindet der Mensch, nur die Zeichnung aus Licht leuchtet auf.


What serves as role models, how are they shaped and disseminated and in what way can they be manipulated? She also asks an older generation for pictures of memories, for pictures that have already established themselves and that have achieved a reality-shaping significance. As well as this, she trawls through analogue picture archives in search of discarded pictures, for documents of forgotten identities, which she puts online, giving them a new reality and a new lease on life.
Johanna Reich also explores and examines – not without irony – conditions and processes for depicting reality in painting and its pursuit of authenticity. For instance, by unveiling with a suitably grand gesture the picture on a canvas as a piece of nature in a classic plein air painting or using drops of water to create a watercolour painting in which the sky and clouds compress to form a mirror, she creates very real snapshots, but it is only the reflected image of these that will survive through the film footage that is taken at the same time, rendering it infinitely reproducible. Which illusions does painting create? What space is given to the painter’s gesture in connection with original, cult and genius? To what extent does the artist identify with the picture (motif) and to what extent is he or she wrapped up in the picture or even disappears completely? Even public space, which is far from being the same thing as space that is open to everyone equally, becomes a subject for discussion. What defines a public space? Who positions themselves here, who moves in this space and in what way? Which political and commercial players are given permission to monitor this movement? In which power rhetoric is the body therefore implicated? And how can it escape from this? What happens when the human body disguises itself, rendering itself invisible to the camera’s technical eye? The artist has, in the form of performance art, been experimenting for years with her own body, with its visibility and perception and the various limitations of these. The body can respond to the monitoring, it can show or conceal itself, disappear, or escape control by becoming invisible. However, this does not mean that it ceases to exist. Just as a black hole does not signify nothingness but rather an accumulation of mass, the body that conceals itself before the camera is still a body in action. If the technical medium fails in its documentary function, a picture still emerges – not a reflection, but a simulacrum.