The Kunsthalle Gießen is pleased to present the first institutional solo-exhibition in Germany by the New York based artist Anna Gaskell (*1969 Des Moines/Iowa). The exhibition focuses on photographic and time-based works which have largely characterised the American artists Œuvre since 1996.
Anna Gaskell creates a suggestion within her work of a chronologically related story, that despite its clearly recognisable and representational visual language, nevertheless appears mysterious and eerie. The main protagonists are often pre-adolescent girls, in their early teenage years to the threshold of becoming women, whose actions remain vague and without resolution.
The photographic series hide (1998) consciously ties in to Gaskell’s early artistic work and forms the conceptual point of departure for the exhibition Hide and Seek. In the years following 1996 Anna Gaskell developed her stylistically influential visual language that gained her international attention.
 
Pictures become mental images
 
Gaskell triggers the imagination process of the viewer with her haunting pieces, forcing them to fill in the gaps in the narrative and to transform it into a complete story, even beyond its own framework. The interpretation of what happens in the images changes with each viewer and their individual media socialization, due to this the actual images are then transformed into mental images.
Thereby, the title Hide and Seek linguistically indicates that a further dimension is concealed behind that that is immediately visible.
The exhibition reveals the facets of narrativity that are controlled by Gaskell’s artistic staging strategies and that force the viewer to conclude what they see. Through this method more is revealed about the viewer’s own self, their own socialization, medial influence and their own cultural context which controls the interpretation and intensity, the degree of violence, erotic gaze and the sinister.
The photographs and films are through their visual language clearly identifiable as staged, with this they imply, at the very least an artistic idea or supplied interpretation. They possess an openness at the narrative level that the viewer actively integrates with regards to an imaginative completion. Therefore the question arises, how much do the individual photographs reveal and to what degree does the imagination of the viewer effect the final interpretation?
 
Expansion into virtual space
 
Through a cooperation with blinkvideo. mediaart, an online platform for international video art, the presentation at the Kunsthalle Gießen is expanding into virtual space. During the exhibition Hide and Seek Anna Gaskell’s video Replayground (2009) will be shown on the online platform
 
A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.