Artist
Peter Pflügler
Peter Pflügler (b. 1987) is an Austrian visual storyteller based in the Netherlands. He holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Pflügler’s work centres on the dynamics of secrets, intergenerational trauma and silence. With the help of photography, video and text, he aims to resurrect the unseen, the unknown and the hidden. His Now is not the right time project has been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions throughout Europe, whilst the dummy was nominated for several international prizes, including the Kassel Dummy Award.
Website: peterpflugler.com
Now is not the right time
When I was two years old, my father went into the woods with the intention of never coming back. For over 20 years, my parents chose silence in response to his suicide attempt. Still, I found myself drawn to the place where the incident happened, and on its anniversary, a wave of grief washed over me. When my parents finally decided to tell me, it all started to make sense. This project started out as an investigation into the traces of a well-kept family secret. While I was revisiting my parents’ trauma – through the places, objects and memories I could not call my own – I found it inside myself. My body always knew. This is no longer a story about a suicide attempt. It’s about the impossibility of secrets, and about what we’re sharing when we hide. This is about pain inflicted out of love, about the complexity of silence, and the inexplicable sadness of a boy. Mum, Dad, this is your trauma – that you kept wrapped up in countless colourful blankets, unknowingly handed over to me in a loving embrace. I will carry it with care.
In Monika Orpik's work titled Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road, we are invited to engage with migration and transience with her stark black-and-white photographs that document various states of impermanence along the Polish-Belarus border. The Białowieża National Forest is the center of Orpik’s meditation on life at a time of political oppression and transformation.
Peter Pflügler’s work Now is not the right time equally begins with a forest and a deep desire to use photography as a means to investigate and render previously hidden secrets visible. Strikingly coherent and honest in his approach, Pflügler’s work intimately instigates a conversation about suicide, secrecy, and the suddenness of time’s ongoing passing.
Raisan Hameed focuses on the materiality of images in his work, Zer-Störung which, as the name suggests, looks at the processes of destruction, and what remains are documents formed by various layers of time as open questions and scars. Starting with the combination of personal and archival imagery from his hometown Mosul, Hammed’s work engages with the photograph’s power to obscure time and meaning.
Bärbel Reinhardt’s work draws from photographic stratification. Working across various modes of presentation, Reinhardt’s work plays with the imaginary quality of the photograph, looking at the contemporary cut-and-paste visual queues as signposts for a recyclable iconography. In her project, again still erratics perhaps, the artist gathers, deconstructs, cuts, assembles, photographs, re-photographs, and repurposes these to create a dense visual space where different times and techniques collaborate.
In artist and author Marie Hervé’s work, history is both completed and open-ended – her tendency to work with a combination of archival and personal imagery anchors her narratives into past, present, and future. Her project The island on the island is a meditation on the Mediterranean territory’s beauty and transience. The act of researching and retracing the past, becomes a means through which to engage with the unstable nature of the present.