OFF LOCATION

Excerpts from Off Location cathaloque text

This work consists of a series of photographs that represent buildings and recognizable locations in the public space. The buildings at first appear familiar, but at the same time there is something alienating and uncanny about these pictures. They have all been digitally retouched, so that all traces of human presence and activity have been removed. Cars, bicycles, traffic lights, graffiti, doors, windows and so on, are missing, making the architecture seem out of scale and alien, like a parallel reality. This is without adding any information that was not there to begin with. All that has occurred is a reduction of information, along with a removal of various pictorial elements. Each picture has been composed of several digital photographs in order to achieve a resolution high enough to make the retouching credible.

The photographs play the part of classical, documentary pictures that unpretentiously show only what has been placed in front of the camera. However, The photograph has thus been decontextualized. Instead of referring unmistakably to a specific place, a particular locality (as is normally the nature of photography), it slides toward an image of pure form and (architectonic) plan.

The retouching contributes to the disquieting effect of the images. The familiar, the recognizable, hides within it something inhuman, uncanny, reducing our ordinary, trivial, everyday spaces to an uninhabited, set-piece universe that shows a deceptive resemblance to reality.

By Anna Krogh, curator:
Illusions of reality

In an untraditional manner, the artist starts out in his photography from an existing reality, irrespective of the fact that it emerges as fiction and construction. This tension is felt in the photographic series from 2004 in which the images of buildings - for instance Klintegården and the Danish National Business Archives at Århus - can relatively easily be identified. But he does not reproduce "only" reality, and nor do the photographs as such represent "just" the well-known places. The photographic image certainly refers to an actual place, but in Rasmussen's universe there is no guarantee that this place has ever existed. By means of retouching, he manipulates the elements in the image in such a way that the buildings emerge as strangely alien and "unheimlich". The reality that is portrayed does not really exist after all, and in this way we can say that these examinations of reality naturally extend the Panoptica series, in which the rooms in the box may well have existed as physical structures, but in the picture appear not to be anchored in a concrete reality. It is really an impossible room with which we are here confronted, but for the artist it seems to be precisely in this impossibility that the aesthetic potential and the perceptual challenge lie.