VIENNA.- In the context of curated by, the gallery festival with international curators in Vienna, Galerie Hubert Winter will present the exhibition BEYOND CERTAINTY, curated by Vanessa Joan Müller.

In his notes On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein explores the question of which fundamental certainties in language and thought enable us to understand one another. However, his verbose exploration of such certainties takes an elliptical approach to the insight that there can be no final confirmation. There may be convictions that seem self-evident, but there are no unquestionable assumptions when speaking about the world. Our experience and the possibility of recognition are limited in language – or rather, fragmented.

Willem Oorebeek is interested in the relationship between text and image, and in their interplay within what is known as visual communication: sign systems that interact with each other, comment on each other, but can also clash in contradiction. He works with mass-produced images, manipulating and transposing them using various printing techniques – a process he refers to as “erasing”. When placed strategically in public spaces, these communication objects become visual surfaces, exposed in their malleable structure between abstraction and representation, form and sign. Attracting and eluding simultaneously, the image presents itself as a surface that suggests a perception of the world while blocking access to reality with its insistent presence. Oorebeek draws attention back to the subject, which loses much of its legibility in the process of transformation, revealing the image politics behind it.

His 144-part wall piece The Printing Press as an Agent of Chance from 2022 borrows its title from Elizabeth Eisenstein's pioneering publication on the history of letterpress printing and its significance for social change. Oorebeek uses the printing sheets from one of his catalogue productions, which are used at the beginning of a print run to calibrate the colour density of an offset printing press. These sheets are frequently reused, causing pages to overlap. Amidst this seemingly random arrangement of images and pages, a newspaper photo of Silvio Berlusconi, the founder of self-mediatisation in politics, repeatedly catches the eye. His reign marked a new economy of attention: the media’s overlay of politics with the visual omnipresence of the banal.

Quite different, and yet not so very different, is Jieun Lim's reference to fragmented realities and the affects associated with them. In her photographs, videos, installations and soundscapes, she explores the memorising and recording of events and situations. From hermetic-looking, subjective fragments of thought, she weaves narratives that appear fictional yet also radiate evidence, whilst their non-linear structure rearranges time and space. Circling around intimacy and inner emotions, these narratives convey a deep sense of loss and alienation, ultimately leaving everything in limbo as a rhythmic sequence of plural, cautious perspectives. Where they converge, something new and yet uncertain emerges, refusing to find closure.

Images of an abstract landscape bathed in red light with an inserted view from an aeroplane, underlaid by a whispering voice that speaks of symptoms whose origins remain hidden. It speaks of the love of others that it eavesdrops and of the hype of the virtual, which is spreading like an epidemic. It itches when it is infected. Where the vaccine was injected. Where the scab formed. My symptoms resemble many stray words. Densely leafed trees, birds on a roof, a gentle bounce on a trampoline: Jieun Lim's works use images as metaphors that refer to what eludes a solely communicative language. The inner speech that emanates from them creates a resonating space that targets those levels where certainty is not an option: beyond the rules of pragmatism and the logic of semantic precision – pure articulation of fragmented subjectivity.

Vanessa Joan Müller