Archive: Michael Höpfner: Unsettled Conditions
Since 1995, the artist, a native of Krems, has been discovering foreign landscapes and cultures by traversing through them by foot and by capturing his visual impressions in b/w photographs. Over the last two years Höpfner’s expeditions have led him to Central and Western Tibet, to Lhasa (capital of the autonomous province of Tibet), to the Kertsch Peninsula, the eastern part of the Ukraine and to the Sinai Peninsula.
What interested him the most during his trip was the evident distinction between the associations and “images of longing“ that western society tends to have of eastern cultures and countries and their actual lifeworlds; of those people “who, in recent years, have been satisfied and settled by state administration or global changes” (Höpfner, 2007). This distinction finds symbolic expression in the nomadic tent, which corresponds to the western idea of wild and untamed romance only at a first glance though which, in the end, is even exchanged for cube-like concrete apartment blocks.
Höpfner’s b/w photography radiates an austerity and coolness and can also be seen as pendant to the West’s romantic images of yearning. In addition to his b/w technique, Höpfner also introduces a further medium as a means of eluding the cliché of yearning: he travels by foot, is “unsettled” and on the road while encountering foreign cultures at an entirely different level than does the tourist industry, for example. The artist thereby generates a decisive perspectival shift.
