A viewer of Tom Sandberg's large-format black-and-white photographs usually sees common motifs. Familiar archetypes of everyday perception depict almost typologically straightforwardly. Instead of the brimming wealth of tiny details of many contemporary photographs, the croppings seem to concentrate on their objects as if on symbols of broader contexts.

Sandberg's motifs are various: grandiose, snow-covered mountain peaks and seascapes, a car parked on a street, a house spookily plunged into fog, a small child on the beach. Aerial photos are often used and move the earth away out of a state of suspension. In his seascape and cloudscape photos, the actual motif is barely recognizable, and the camera plumbs the very limits of what the eye is capable of grasping. This reinforces the aura of unreality, sometimes of uncanniness, that is inherent to many of his pictures.

Sandberg thereby becomes a documentary recorder of typologies of the human gaze. His details permit hardly any conclusions about their greater context. They indicate neither the specific site, nor the geographic surroundings of the picture. The photos of this much-traveled artist are thus "fragmentary documents of his being en route". (Mirjam Thomann, BE #14)



Fotografien 2007, Studio 2,
August 17 – September 2 2007,
Opening: Thursday, 16. August 2007, 19 h

Lisa Jonasson's graphics, posters, comics, and drawings could, at first glance, be taken for the products of a naïve approach to art, because, in great detail and opulently, they mirror the variety of the world in vast ink panoramas. But at second glance, they are not archaic, but artistic research projects treating human states of emotion and their external manifestation, perception of oneself and others, and the collective's effects on the individual.

"Looking at Swedish artist Lisa Jonassons latest work, you get the feeling the picture is at struggle. Bodies, faces, styles, looks, and postures, every last detail seems to want to turn itself inside out, to almost escape from its own shape. You might enter the picture through some familiar detail: a hand... a horse...an eye, just to be sucked into unfamiliar loops with unsuspected associations and transformations. Converging with this distortion of motives, is a simultaneous distortion of the style: The endless flow of mutated faces and grotesque creatures, are depicted in a freaky mix of drawing styles, like some imaginary folk art from a culture yet to be invented." Matti Kallioinen



Drawings, Studio 3,
August 17 – September 2 2007,
Opening: Thursday, 16. August 2007, 19 h

For two periods of time, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH is showing video works by the artist couple Heather and Patrick Burnett-Rose and by the artist and architect Pia Lidmann. Heather and Patrick Burnett-Rose are interested in political and military conflicts, consumerism, violence, and our society’s mania for technology; Pia Lidmann demonstrates the influence of a self-constructed camera on the behavior of the filmed individual. In her video, the apparatus takes power over the image.



Burnett-Rose / Pia Lindmann, Studio 1,
August 17 – September 2 2007,
Opening: Thursday, 16. August 2007, 19 h

Burnett-Rose – Finale: Beautiful Sad, 16th – 24th August 2007, Studio 1 / Pia Lindman – Fascia, 25th August - 2nd September 2007, Studio 1