Productive Image Interference: An Excursion into the Power of Manipulated Images

The German painter and photographer Sigmar Polke would have turned 80 this year. He became famous for his raster pictures, for which he transformed, recoded or even disturbed images disseminated by the mass media, thus creating image defects or exposing them. At the beginning of the 1960s, Polke's time at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and also the birth of these works, no one had any idea of the concept of »fake news« or even of the extent to which photo manipulation, transmission errors, quality losses, hacks and fast-moving images would one day influence our everyday consumption of images. Together with the Anna Polke Foundation, the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle has now created the occasion for the exhibition Productive Image Interference: Sigmar Polke and Artistic Perspectives Today from the anniversary and the topicality of his raster images. The exhibition will be on show at the Düsseldorf exhibition centre from 13 November.

In it, Polke's works are juxtaposed with those of contemporary artists in order to examine his delight in deception as well as the strength of the supposedly erroneous, blurred and changeable. While Polke's exhibits question the power of (manipulated) images, the exhibition shows which tools more contemporary positions choose to use image disruption as a productive starting point for creative work even today and to negotiate cultural and political issues. Productive Image Interference runs until 6 February 2022. In addition to Polke, artists represented include Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Seth Price, Max Schulze and Avery Singer.

The exhibition is part of the international festival of the same name (25-27.11.21) at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, organised by the Anna Polke Foundation, and thus embedded in a supporting programme. Representatives of various disciplines will tie in with the themes of the exhibition and discuss, for example, the contexts of origin, conditions of perception and manifestations of productive image disorder.