Art Projects – Rupert Jaeger

Hostile Takeover

October 15, 2016 February 17, 2022

In early summer 2016, uncanny events started to occur at the Hundred Years Gallery, an independent art gallery in East London, UK. Initially, the good people of the gallery did not pay much attention, as they thought it was the benevolent spirit of Melquiades, who had made the gallery his temporary home many a times before. Yet what unfolded over the following three months was anything but benevolent and would change the Hundred Years Gallery forever.

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Hostile Takeover was exhibited at the Hundred Years Gallery, London, England; 24 – 30 September 2016

‘When there was Certainty’

June 23, 2016 May 11, 2023

To find out more about ‘When there was Certainty’, click here

LISBOA

November 15, 2015 February 15, 2022

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Lisboa’ centres around ‘The Protagonist’, who wears a white decontamination outfit, including surgical gloves and a gasmask. We follow him, as he explores a strange city devoid of humans made up of derelict houses, which have their windows and doors bricked up. On some walls of the city, there are images of other places, although it is not clear, if the Protagonist finds them or if he is placing them there.

As the journey evolves, we realise that he is followed by ‘The Antagonist’, a character in a black suit, shoes, gloves and balaclava, carrying a black briefcase. The scenes, characters and settings evoke associations of ‘Scottie’ Ferguson following Madeleine Elster through San Francisco in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The journey of the two characters through the city is intercut with animations connecting, via the images on the wall, to other places and moments in time.

About one third into the film, the Protagonist finds himself in ‘Rossio Square’, in the centre of Lisbon. Wide, static shots of the Protagonist, in the middle of the empty square, are intercut with handheld, telephoto shots of him amongst crowds of people. On the side of the square, the Antagonist is sitting on a bench, looking into his open briefcase and towards the Protagonist.

We then see a series of shots of the crowd, with recurring focus on the faces of a particular group of people within the crowd. Amongst them, is a man in his mid-thirties with an unusual – upwards facing – haircut. The three sets of shots are intercut and accompanied by a collage of voices and other surrounding sounds, yet they are distorted, as if played by an old audio transmitter. The whole scene, in particular the sound, is reminiscent of a central scene of Coppola’s The Conversation taking place in San Francisco’s Union Square.

The scene is followed by a collage of animations and short scenes of previous encounters of the two main characters. Eventually, we end up back in the city and see the Antagonist walking up a long, narrow and curved path of steps. This is juxtaposed with the Protagonist walking up a hill as well. At the top, he reaches a house, which is partly in ruins. As he starts peeping through a window, we cut to the Antagonist who is now in front of a wall with a bricked up window right in front of him. A long shot reveals that both characters are in fact at opposite ends of the same house.

Cut to: interior scene, the people from the earlier group on the square are dispersed around a room. Some of them are engaged in seemingly absurd activities. In the far corner, a woman with dark hair and a white dress is standing in front of a wind machine, which makes the dress move gently. On the right side of the room, a man is repeatedly moving backwards and forwards taking countless photos of an image stuck to the wall. On the opposite side, a woman is dressing a small, Voodoo type figure. Other people from the group are gathered around a table, watching an old movie on a TV in front of them. Amongst them is the man from earlier with the unusual haircut. While smoking a cigarette and casually watching the movie on the TV, he is cleaning a 16mil Bolex film camera.

At the centre of the room, also facing the TV, is a man, who has been tied to a chair and had his mouth gagged. He has blond, curly hair, and is wearing dark suit trousers and a white shirt. His black tie seems to have been cut off partly.

Cut to: The Protagonist standing in front of a window, which is filled with concrete. In its centre, an image has been attached, showing the never ending loop of images on other walls.
A close up shows the Protagonist’s finger touching and moving over the image. We hear a woman’s voice:

‘Here I was born, and here I died’

As we hear the voice, and other sounds of an old movie, we cut to a close up of the tied up man. He is very agitated and attempts to speak, despite having gaffa tape over his mouth. His eyes are fixated on the TV screen, which is showing a scene of James Cole, the main character of Gilliam’s Twelve Monkey’s, in a cinema playing Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Cole whispers to the person next to him:

‘I think I’ve seen this movie before’

Cut to: Exterior, close up of the image on the wall from earlier, then a wide shot revealing the whole scene: An alleyway with a red suspension bridge in the background. The protagonist is nowhere to be seen, in the foreground, the Antagonist – his briefcase standing next to him – is looking to where the Protagonist was before. Fade to black, end titles: LISBOA

LISBOA was part of Mnemonic City Lisbon. It was exhibited at Roundabout.LX; Lisbon, Portugal; 24 – 30 September 2015

South Bronx, 1984

September 14, 2015 February 23, 2022

In this chapter of the story, the Protagonist travels back in time to a place full of romantic memories, but upon arrival finds the place completely bomded out.

He explores the area in search of answers, but there are no inhabitants to be found or any other clues that could bring conclusive answers. Wishing to return to the future he makes his way back to where he came from. He walks for hours, in what seems to be circles, unable to find where he came from, until he realises that he is trapped in his own mechanical time travel instrument.

He eventually resigns to his fate and invents a strange, yet beautiful robotic dance, just to enjoy the eternal melody of time itself.

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South Bronx, 1984 was exhibited as part of Interfaces, which explored the idea of art & technology; Barbican Centre, London, UK; 21 -24 August 2015

Imparando da Firenze

December 23, 2014 February 12, 2022

‘Imparando d Firenze’ is the 3rd project in my ‘surface gateway’ series, which connects different spaces and locations as well as different, precisely defined, moments in time. This is achieved by applying a surface snapshot, representing the previous location and moment in time, to a particular position within a – usually urban – context. The resulting surface gateway trail connects all instances of any given trail, with a number of trails usually converging at regular intervals within a general location and timeframe. In this case, 3 surface gateway trails converged in Florence, Italy, within the timeframe of 12 to 27 of June 2014.

The outcome of this project was a video (09:36 min), which combines experimental stop frame animation with fragments of a loose narrative. For the first time in the ‘surface gateway’ series I made extensive use of sound, which helps to convey a sense of a narrative, while creating a coherent soundscape for the experimental elements of the video.

‘Imparando d Firenze’ was shown at Galeria Xenos as part of Magma Collective’s Mnemonic City series. Due to the time restriction, I presented this project as a conventional video projection – in the basement of the gallery – as opposed to the installation format that I generally use for the ‘surface gateway’ series.

Surreal Business Cycle (prototype #1)

August 13, 2014 February 12, 2022

‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ was the first in my image & light installation series. I had been experimenting with the juxtaposition of video and printed images before, but for this project I combined them to create a sculptural piece that was literally made out of images, with a video at the core of the sculpture. Technically, ‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ is a 35 x 20 x 20 cm glass box that is almost entirely covered with semi-translucent images. A video screen is installed in the lower centre, in portrait format at a 45 degree angle, playing mostly split-screen stop-frame animation.

The concept of the piece is part of a bigger experimental narrative, which follows the trail of images and events that originated in the revisiting of a moment that originally took place in Barcelona, Spain, on the 22nd of September 2001 at 15:17:28 hrs. The ‘protagonist’, like a time traveler from the future, forensically examines the remnants and their visual surfaces of a time bygone, with a particular obsession for the currencies of ‘Old Europe’, found in a seemingly random manner on walls of cities across Europe and beyond.

The printed images form a collage of memories, snapshots of urban decay and fragments of a loose narrative, while the video illuminates the object from the inside, thereby creating a semi-translucent object that takes on different meaning depending on the angle of the observer.

‘Surreal Business Cycle‘ was shown as part of the ‘Mnemonic City’ series. The exhibition took place in the Doomed Gallery, Dalston, London under the banner ‘Mnemonic City: Plato’s Cave’ with other work of 12 artists of Magma Collective.

The Nostalgia Machine

August 7, 2014 February 12, 2022

‘The Nostalgia Machine’ was the second installation, where I combined (back)-lit still images with video, after the ‘Surreal Business Cycle’ a few months earlier. This time it was in the form of a traditional light box, with an opaque, back-lit plexiglass on the front that had a number of images and text printed on, and a video screen fixed in the centre of the plexiglass.

The video in the centre of the light box is about 20 minutes long and plays on a loop. It consists mainly of stop-frame animations, following the trail of printed stickers in various locations, whereby each sticker depicts an image of the pervious location. The camera, in stop frame manner, continuously moves towards or away from each sticker, and then jumps to the previous or next location, thereby creating the illusion of ‘flying’ from on place to the other. The stickers were placed in particular places within (mostly) urban environments, in various cities and different points in time. All of the trails converge on ‘Ridley Road Market’ in Dalston, London, in spring 2013, which becomes the focal point of this journey into memories and urban space.

The images on the light box show the key moments of each time/space trail and are accompanied by the precise location and moment in time of capture. This key image also becomes the sticker for any subsequent potential trail, and in such cases is accompanied by the measurements of the stickers and its price of sale.

The text, underneath the video, describes the workings of the Nostalgia Machine in technical detail:

‘Beauty and Love were frozen: Seven years, three months, two days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds. After that they were simply absent, non-existent. In this emotional vacuum devoid of strong affection and personal attachment and without any perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction, a structure slowly became apparent that would eventually display characteristics akin to notions of beauty and love: Time, reflected through the abstract arrangement of inter-related, interconnected and interwoven points, instances and moments.

The most critical of all points in this structure is what could be called the point of inversion. At this point, all previous moments, which were irrelevant at their time of occurrence, and the abstract arrangement as a whole, which was hitherto unaware of its own existence, take on a retrospective meaning that transcends ideas of nostalgia, as the true meaning does not lie in any properties the points may reflect, but in the pure appreciation of the moment(s) as an experience of time itself.

In appreciating this pure experience of time lies the true beauty and love of the process, while the structure, as an abstract arrangement, is the manifestation of this process. Images, however destructive and obstructive to the process in general, are instrumental in a number of ways, but have to be defended against the attacks of the ‘Nostalgia Machine’, which would logically attempt to intrude and infiltrate the process, thereby rendering it ineffective and incorporating the process in the Nostalgia Machine’s all encompassing representation of life as an audio and visual surface of perceived properties of beauty and love. The Nostalgia Machine’s inherent propensity to fictionalize life functions proportionally successful to its ability of presenting an ever perfecting narrative, seemingly in tune with the eternal rhythm of beauty and love. ‘The process’ must resist such tendencies and embrace the sensual pleasures of time without notions of past and future. This effort of identifying narrative-free moments in time can only succeed, if the following two preconditions are observed:

(1): the selection of images need to follow a ‘process’ of elimination.
Each identified moment is to be positioned against a set of images, which must gradually decrease in numbers for each successive moment until the point of inversion is reached, the precise occurrence of which is identified through one single image.

(2): While the use of seemingly nostalgia laden images creates a growing emotional attachment to each moment in time, the experience of this emotional attachment has to become less personal with each successive moment. At the point of inversion, one single image, intolerably nostalgia laden, yet devoid of personal memories, breaks the memory-nostalgia relation, which results in a climactic experience, at once full of euphoric revelation and profound disappointment.’

[…]

‘The Nostalgia Machine’ was shown as part of the ‘Mnemonic City’ series. It was shown at the Doomed Gallery in Dalston, London, just off Ridley Road Market under the banner ‘Mnemonic City: Moving Streets’ with other work of 10 artists of Magma Collective.

The dimensions of the light box are 90 x 65 x 14 cm.

Family Tree

October 18, 2013 May 8, 2016

For my parents wedding anniversary in 2012 I produced Family Tree, a lamp with a lampshade that’s made up from family photographs, covering the lives of my parents – from when they were born – their six children and 7 grand children (with 2 more on their way).

Measurements
Diameter: 33cm
Height: 30cm (60cm including stand)
Below is a small selection of photos from the lampshade.

my Dad as a baby

my Mom and her sister

my parents on their wedding day

my parents on their honey moon

me and my Mom

me and my Dad

me and my sisters, Elisabeth, Monika and Barbara

a Renault 4, one of the first cars that I can vaguely remember

my sister Johanna, me and my brother Benedikt in Italy

my sister, brother and a few friends halfway up ‘Dreckberg’ (dirt mountain), an unused plot of land in the neighbourhood, which was our favourite playing area