Material - Anhaftung - variabel

In spring 2022, Barbara Proschak published Material - Anhaftung - variabel (MMKoehn Verlag, Leipzig). This comprehensive 500-page artist's book focuses on her sketchbooks from the past ten years. This compendium reveals the wide range of Proschak's photographic and pictorial investigations and highlights her artistic practice.

It is always about collecting objects in images and placing the individual images in relation to one another. The picture panels created in these compilations are reminiscent of display panels from a museum and pretend to be objective, although they often have an inherent playful, associative lightness. The objects that are placed in a new context in this way are on the one hand objects that could come from natural history collections, such as prepared butterflies or magnolia blossoms, and on the other hand objects from the consumer world, such as a Korean body-shaping suit or a red designer chair, in or on which the photographer depicts herself and thus relates herself to the objects. Finally, there are numerous skin impressions and macro shots of moles on the artist's skin (reinterpretations of the classic artist's self-portrait, so to speak), which are juxtaposed with other photographed structures. The cartographies of the moles on her skin look like star maps. The publication reveals the constant connection between the individual image and the series. It documents the extent to which each image originates from a larger context and simultaneously can merge into a new, unexpected context. In the sketchbooks, it becomes clear that Proschak's artistic approach consists of collecting found objects and arranging them freely, whereby her own body repeatedly serves as a corrective to the objects of the external world - both as an object of observation and as an instrument for entering into a relationship with the found objects and proposing new contexts of meaning and useful functions for them.

Barbara Proschak is part of »Guest Room: Heather Canlas Rigg & Emmy Lee Wall«.

Check out her Artist Feature “re_touch”.