Maaretta Jaukkuri, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
In my discussions with Frank Uwe Laysiepen I noted that he has a keen eye for social issues as well as for society at large. To a growing degree, he is also engaging other people in the process of making his work. Recent examples are his Monument for the Future, a public art project for the city of Tilburg, as well as the way this exhibition Performing Light is put together as a chain of guest curators working together with him on his entire oeuvre. When looking through his work, I got very interested in the images of groups of people in his work.
A line of its own is made by the performance images, which are like abstract social situations. The images chosen for this exhibition also involve other people, either as invited participants or as spectators.
When going through his travel albums, the issue of people in groups started to acquire other dimensions. In these images, the role of the artist as the one who looks at people, is traditionally evident. However, when riding on a holy elephant through an Indian village, the strange attracts so much attention among the local people, that the event of looking becomes a two-way movement.
Another way of forming groups is manifested in the series of the homeless people in New York, where the people's vulnerable social situation, together with the fact that these people are exclusively of other ethnic backgrounds than white, makes the series into a poignant social statement. Theses people's ability to preserve dignity in their situation, is a powerful statement of their psychological strength, but also of Frank Uwe Laysiepen's ability to make them feel at ease in the situation of being photographed. (This series was also included in the first part of Performing Light, curated by Thomas McEvilley.)
The same method of forming a group, is seen in the series of Polaroid photographs of nude young people, which Frank Uwe Laysiepen has made in Prague. The postures taken by these people, remind of classical statues, but at the same time, as not - quite - successful repetitions of these postures, they become funny parodies of them and start communicating on the level of signs, in this case bodily signs, which we try to make sense of. Among this group, we have placed two large scale Polaroid photographs of texts at Polargrams exposed with a torch, which tell about gifts and giving as a social form of exchange. They can be read only through a mirror.
The video Still Standing is shown, documenting the social relevance of photography in China. The sequences of taking a family portrait tell about family hierarchies and social conventions. In an upstairs room, a portfolio with about 60 Polaroids presents a series Retouching Bruises, of a photographic performance where two people - a man and a woman - make finger marks on each other's skin, then retouching these fingerprints on the actual Polaroid photographs. There are many more layers of Frank Uwe Laysiepen's work that have to do with expanding the identity of the artist as well as bringing new dimensions to the way we look at people around us. In his textual self-portraits from the seventies, there are definitions of himself through his connections to various people and groups, and consequently to society at large. In the work made in 1974, he announced Mein Abschied als einzige Person (A farewell to me as a single person). It is an interesting document of perceiving oneself as many shifting identities. Understanding this is a prerequisite for the kind of communication where there is space for others 'to give their gifts' too.