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Global Move Part 1 (2005/2006)
Rainer Junghanns began his Global Move project in 2005 in New York with a car journey from the much fabled, bohemian “Chelsea Hotel” to the piers and back. Junghanns repeated this journey every three hours on the dot during the following 24 hours, at different times of the day and night therefore, each trip lasting seven to ten minutes. Junghanns then selected a minute-long section from each of the ensuing eight videos shot during these journeys.
The aim of Global Move is simple in essence: images from all continents across the globe are to be compiled. Junghanns photographed the edifice of a bank in Dubai every three hours to capture the changing light reflections on the glass façade. In this case, too shot in three hourly intervals, a whole day is captured including a full rotation of the earth, whereby the only perceivable movement in these static pictures is the mirrored reflections in the glass façades, i.e. as a change in the light; thus the old, ethnic and much more interesting face of Dubai can only be seen as a reflection in the modern, globally standardised architecture, which could quite easily also be Bangkok. This view of the old, so palpable during daylight hours, is however completely marginalised at night through the internal lighting of the building, that is to say through the electrical operating system of the modern business world.
The third motif of the Global Move series comprises photographs taken on Iceland. The pictorial connection of the continents by means of a photographic and filmic documentation of individual stages of a journey is considered by the artist to be the forerunner to a bigger project involving a journey on a container ship across all time zones on Earth. As a provisional appraisal, it can be said that Rainer Junghanns’ artistic development over the last five years has shifted from the dramatisation of a space (Neue Tischgemeinschaften) to the White Cubes of the art industry, whence to the visualisation of movement processes in personally experienced, every day spaces: whereas the early sculptures came into being in the studio, the movement to the locations and the (media) work at the locations actually now precedes it. Such an extension of space has quite literally attained a global character.
April 2006
by Jürgen Raap
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