↳ Exhibitions

Cédric Eisenring at DREI

September 22, 2021

Artist: Cédric Eisenring

Exhibition title: Superdream

Venue: DREI, Cologne, Germany

Date: September 3 – October 30, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and DREI, Cologne

In his third solo exhibition with the gallery, Cédric Eisenring is showing a fence that runs through all the exhibition spaces, a series of photographs, and a commissioned multi-channel audio work.

Intercoms convey a specific promise of connectivity and communication, of being gateways into other spaces. Corporate buildings and gated tenements are often encoded with this promise in the way they use the surveillance technology as a tool for brief exchange, when in reality communication is only facilitated in one way. Eisenring’s series of black-and-white photographs of intercoms taken in 2021 in Berlin and Zurich suspend the idea of the approachable, knowable building. They invoke more spaces, more corridors, more rooms, and the black-and-white inversion of the images literally adds “negative” or “inverted” space. Divisions between inside and outside seem to become blurry. Whatever the factuality of this type of architectural photography and the alleged objectivity of the black-and-white image may be, the bright pop colors of pink/ yellow gate (2021) scream maximum artifice.

A voice wanders from one room to the next in a multi-channel audio piece pink/ green light (2021) and reads in sequences a story by Elizabeth Ouze, which was commissioned with the instruction to write a story based on an architectural drawing provided by the artist. Imbuing the gallery spaces with shifting emotional latencies, the piece indicates a world of make-believe that both corporate architecture and fairy tales might have in common. The actual delivery of what’s insinuated is always deferred, and so is desire never fulfilled, while more spaces keep on popping up.