Katja Liebmann: Dust in the Wind

About

With this body of work, Liebmann creates “etchings of time” by revisiting negatives, made over the last twenty-five years, to condense time and memory. By bringing together yesterday and today, and using low tech photographic processes, she creates work which has a timeless and painterly quality allowing her to “develop time like a picture” for “memories are malleable and recollection changes with time”.

“During our journeys through life, to our alleged goal, it is easy to become detached from our immediate environment. It becomes hard to see anything beyond what we have already learned to see and most of what we see, when we see, is quick and remote; we are lost in thought. I try to capture these traces of moments, of life happening around us, frozen in one image.”

The title Dust in the Wind inspired by the Kansas song, reflects Liebmann’s interest in the metaphor of the journey and her exploration of time passing. There is a melancholy in the work, which mirrors the ageing process of the material she is reusing, and which alludes to a sense of impermanence and mortality.

“Some of the negatives were quite dusty, and to me it was this dust, telling it´s own story, adding to the enigma of the images.”

Using simple old analogue cameras, these images were taken by the artist in the 1990s whilst on walks and bus trips through London and New York in order to capture the ‘spirit of the city’. For Liebmann the intention was to document each journey from the point of boarding to the end of the line, the final destination.

The title of some of these works and the overall subject matter suggest a longing for belonging as seen through the eyes of an outsider. Liebmann also makes the trace of human presence almost indecipherable and this eradication of identifiable figures echoes the invisibility of the individual and the anonymity of the city.

Liebmann’s life has been characterised by moving to new places and adapting to change. Dust in the Wind gathers these visual recordings of urban anonymity and transforms them in hauntingly beautiful images which document a uniquely personal journey.