Immer Noch Sturm
Immer Noch Sturm
Over the past decade Peter Piller has compiled thousands of images –from unspectacular newspaper photographs to old postcards or abandoned archives. His body of work has been created through re‐ordering and staging new and existing images, giving them a new meaning through this re‐arrangements and the making of unexpected associations. Piller’s archivistic and archaeological operations on this visual material provide a way of understanding how meaning is produced through pictures.
In Peter Piller’s own words: “Collecting for me is often a stirring up, not an answering of questions. This is what interests me so much about it. And naturally I am often astonished by how an interest in a seemingly mundane subject can become more and more complex, and how much more information images contain than one would think at first glance”.*
For his fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD, Peter Piller presents a new, never shown to date, archive photographic series, a constellation of 30 archival black and white prints which he groups under the title Immer noch Sturm (Still Storming). The work combines images of exposed, desolate, bald landscapes with images of rough seas. They are all found images collected from old postcards showing scenes of land after war “storms” during World War I and old books published in the same period. Despite the supposedly opposed nature of the land and the sea views, the two sets of images blend in a kind of romantic image of a “storming” scape, where some similarities between the two kinds of images can be found. The reference to the classic representations of war landscapes in the history of painting is probably evident.