«INDEX»

A collective gesture instead of individual works: The artists who were invited to take part in the «Dust is Us» exhibition in the NEVERNEVERLAND gallery decided not to create a conventional exhibition with individual works of art. Instead, they produced a collaborative publication in the form of a double-sided A3 magazine produced as a riso print. As one of the twenty artists invited, I decided to reflect on the importance of visual imagery, archives and reproductions in this day and age for my contribution to the publication. The starting point for Christian Herren’s installation are five online key visuals from the Sandberg Instituut art school, which were used on the school’s website from around 1992 to 2000. The digital images were used to illustrate the five areas of the website (INDEX) and subsequently embodied the school’s overall direction. Today universities and colleges in particular primarily communicate via digital channels. Despite this, printed material is often more systematically archived than digital content. This is also the case with the Sandberg Instituut: The key visuals that epitomised the school twenty years ago are not stored in its archives and today’s staff cannot uncover any connections to the images either in terms of content or at a visual level. Knowing that the exhibition’s publication will be archived, Christian Herren painted these five key visuals in a uniform size (50x40 cm) in oil on canvas and presented these at the exhibition opening. Reproductions of the images from the Internet (in the correct aspect ratio) have been included in the publication. Each image has a caption that suggests it is a reproduction of Herren’s paintings. Herren has thus appropriated the pictures and, in future, will be named as the author of these visual images in the school’s archive.