Anlagen

Overview

Uschi Huber’s work centres around the use of photography and video, creating both her own series of images as well as working with already existing pictorial material.

In her photography, Huber depicts the often neglected and overlooked aspects of how the growing urban and post- industrial environment is defined and structured. The motifs of Huber’s small format prints are often mundane and seem all too familiar. But with small shifts in the perception of reality, they allow for eye-opening interpretations of cultural and aesthetic phenomena. Huber’s work process thus resembles that of a cultural researcher, not in a scientific sense, but through images that make complex relationships visible, reflecting at the same time how these images are constructed – a method that is also present in her video pieces and installations.

She is drawn to places that are defined predominantly by their function, as in her series on European Highways, Autobahn” (1997/2000), photographed from the perspective of a pedestrian walking alongside the highways, observing details one would not normally notice whilst driving.

In the photoseries “Anlagen” (2001/2006), Huber deals with the fast-growing infrastructure of global tourism. Photographing in mass-tourism centres in Spain, Israel, Egypt and recently in Dubai, she looks at hotels and vast holiday resorts at an unusual moment: out of season or under construction. The pools are shown empty, the architecture is often in a state of imperfection and the deserted landscapes around the hotels are included in the overall view. Huber allows us to study these structures from a distance, as if presented with the remains of an unknown civilisation. She offers a non-polemical view, with no specific focal points or highlights in her motifs – nothing much to hold on to other than a strong but uncanny feeling of familiarity.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.