Paul Valentin works with video from an unconventional perspective. His decided pursuit is the understanding of the structure, and construction, of reality. He holds a masters from the academy of fine arts munich and his background lies in both sculpture and time-based media. Already, it may be discerned that what he presents to the viewer is a spatial manipulation that informs his visual apparatus, the narrative. It appears that he works with video by placing and displacing things as if he were a ghost living in the dimension, which he generates. Thus it is the objects in his films that tell the viewer Valentin’s story.
His most recent exhibition is titled Paul Valentin. Lost Arc (2023) at Haus der Kunst and is curated by assistant curator of the museum, Teresa Retzer. The materiality of the exhibition exists as a large-scale digital print fastened as wallpaper to a long wall in the SLK Gallery. The printed image is distorted version of a forgotten archive. However, the second piece of the installation is a video projection that decrypts the obfuscated picture for the viewer. To feed this decryption, real-time footage is sourced from the museum’s surveillance camera and thrown onto the wallpaper.
From the decoded image, a depiction of what appears to be an underground storage is made clear. What the audience sees is the chamber of the museum housing sculpted stone human busts, archival boxes, and crates of music records on steel shelving. A chandelier, a sleeping lion sculpture, sawhorses, exit signs, and wooden crates become visually present on the wall. What untold stories could this picture allude to?
3 sept 2023
an interview with Paul Valentin on his debut exhibition Paul Valentin. Lost Arc at Haus der Kunst
What does lost arc mean? What has been lost?
"Arc" can be understood in several ways. On the one hand as an abbreviation for "archive" and further in the sense of a "story arc" and thus a bridging to other points of view. Lost Arc is for me an excerpt of a fictional archive, which contains everything there ever was and ever will be – All ideas, all moments and all things. Things emerge from this archive when we discover them as ideas and return to this archive when they are forgotten, for example.
What, or whose, narrative, is being shown here?
The almost 50 square meter large picture on the wall shows, of course, only a small section of this "infinitely" large archive. In hypothetical infinitely large spaces, localization is difficult because it cannot be done by coordinates because there is infinitely much space in all directions and there is no center. So the only possibility is a relative reference position to which one relates. For this I have chosen the place or the section where my artistic practice intersects with things that concern the Haus der Kunst as a place. Thus, my personal archive pieces find themselves next to those of the historic house. As if placement within the archive is something situational that changes depending on the context and therefore I exhibit in the Haus der Kunst, the objects of the archive also intersect with each other, those that concern my work and those that concern the house. And that's how it is in reality. By exhibiting at this place and dealing with its history, I am mentally in its rooms and I am concerned with things that have to do with the house, such as the Nazi past and it’s historical archives
How does this work fit into your practice and into your narrative of work?
about the aspect that here the camera poses the question of reality. Which is always an important theme in my work and on the other side because the question of perspective is very important to me. Here I take the perspective of the person who will be exposed to the work the longest - that of the gatekeeper. They look at the mural both through their monitor and through a large window. On the monitor they see the image not distorted and at the same time it is completely distorted in the view from the window. On the other hand, the aspect of the camera plays a role, which I will explain further down the road...
How do you want this exhibition to be viewed later, in 100 years?
Uh 100 years, I don’t know I'm not really a long-term-ist ...but it would be nice if the critical, slightly antiplatonic thought survives - which critically evaluates the statement that on the one hand we would never see the world as it "really" is, and on the other hand that fiction would not contain truth (im opposing those) I hope that a critical attitude to these philosophical points will lead us to rediscover a universalism that will help us to better understand other points of view and that the discourse of art will become more benevolent and inclusive, taking the viewers more into consideration.
Can you explain further about the fact/fiction dichotomy in the work? Does the break in the image on the wall, the distortion, represent a form of fiction?
as the curator of the exhibition Teresa Retzer pointed out to me, its the case that in my latest video work "A Piano Plays In Another Room and it's Raining“ (2022) the protagonist of the film is a camera-robot that observes the stage-like nature of the world. At the same time, of course, I resist the "objective" view that technology is often accused of (unemotional and scientific) because the distortion of the image is a reality that remains hidden from the camera - from the camera's point of view, the image (the fiction) is visible and that is exciting but the reality of the distortion can only be experienced when we move freely in space and position ourselves differently to the work. What is an infinite space in the camera is a wall in the visitor's world.
I could go on philosophizing here for another 100 years (then i could be around to check my previous answer)
How does this installation fit into the contemporary dialogue about hegemonic narrative constructions of the past and present?
The camera, which is actually an instrument of surveillance and is often taken for an objective observer, shows an illusory image, which does represent the factual reality, but in such a "distorted“ way that the most important aspect (namely the distortion) is not represented. To experience this extremely important fact, one must be present in person. This presence can be seen as a call to understand the role of the individual and its view as a corrective that can unmask the declared objective view as, for example an ideological one.
Do you see yourself as having a responsibility to present a factual representation to the audience?