“Zapping” is Argentine artist Pat Binder’s (b. 1960) title for the installation she created especially for the exhibition at the ifa-Gallery Friedrichstraße. Her work fits into the gallery’s roster of shows, which are primarily devoted to exhibiting artists from Eastern and Central Europe, in a peculiarly harmonious way. The process of fundamental upheaval and change currently taking place in the world, characterised by the disintegration of the power blocs and the artistic reappraisal of the past and of everyday life in the dictatorship, plays just as important a role as the confrontation with questions of origin and national and personal identity.
In choosing the title of the exhibition, Pat Binder also had her more recent works in mind. They deal with the flood of images that penetrates our living rooms every day via the television screen – the window to the world – and with a concept of reality that is increasingly determined by electronic media. She sees defining herself as a subject in the barrage of external influences and insecurities via her own means as an inner necessity, i.e. to intervene in the stream of images with a “program of her own”, which she understands as a “moat of my longings and fears, as an advertisement for my innermost sense of self”.
Slightly older works created since 1993, recall the importance she attached to the book as a symbol of civilization during a particular phase of her creative life. In assemblages arranged dialogically on the wall and floor, books appear as energies of cultures fixed in writing. Lead cables on one wall resemble writing, their archaic heaviness creating a contrast to the “Zapping Line” opposite, in which television images placed on glass panes, superimposed and interspersed with recordings of the artist’s own body, have been combined to form a reflection on the contemporary visual experience.