Patrizia Bach – Archive Works

11 May – 1 July 2018

Patrizia Bach’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul Archive Works gives an overview of her work in the last ten years. The artist whose main medium is drawing, has been working on topics such as archiving, collecting and re-arranging as well as approaching the city as a site of memory, history and storage. For the past decade, Bach has been focusing on long term projects that include in-depth research processes which result with expansive drawing installations that take over architecture.

Walter Benjamin’s thought-images and his ways of writing strongly influenced Bach’s work in the recent years. Her first encounter with this material took place in 2012 in the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin. Since then his pictures and thoughts accompany her in making. They led her to Paris, where Benjamin himself-in his day-tried to rewrite the history of 19th century of France. Afterwards, she followed him to Moscow and retraced the steps of his Moscow Diary and finally Bach traveled with his notes On the Concept of History to Istanbul.

Walter Benjamin’s belief that history is inherent in all present things and pictures and that they are always to be read “in the fight for the oppressed past” did not only change the artist’s personal relation to history but influenced and changed her work immensely – also in retrospect her long-term work on and with amateur photographs, the TOMIKO Archive. In a certain sense, in her practice a complete circle spins from the Archive to Benjamin and from Benjamin back to the Archive.

The exhibition brings together her projects “Arcades-Work”, “TOMIKO Archive” and “Past on each of its Moments be Citable”: An installation of over 400 Drawings, accompanied by the projects’ research material, such as photographs, sketchbooks, maps and artist-books giving the viewer a glimpse of the artist’s journey and process.

Patrizia Bach (b. 1983, Munich) is an artist who lives and works between Berlin and Istanbul. She received several grants and scholarships, including the DAAD-scholarship and research-scholarship of Berliner Senate for the project “Past, in Each of its Moments be Citable – an Exhibition Project on Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History in the City of Istanbul”, as well as the Nafög scholarship of Berlin and the grant of Stiftung Kunstfond for her work on Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades-Project”. Her monograph “Arcades-Work, Drawings on Walter Benjamin” was published in 2017 in German and English language by Revolver-Publishing, Berlin with accompanying texts by Kathrin Busch and Knut Ebeling.

http://patriziabach.de/en/
http://benjamin-passagen.de
https://revolver-publishing.com/zeichnungen-zu-walter-benjamin.html

This exhibition is supported by the Goethe-Institut, Istanbul and the Walter Benjamin Archive, Berlin.

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