Z-LAND

Eno Henze, Mihai Grecu & Thibault Gleize, Heinz Hajek-Halke and Michael Reisch

19 January – 02 March 2013

From January 19 to March 2, 2013, Hengesbach Gallery presents four positions in abstract photography and experimental video art. The imaginary term Z-LAND attempts to encompass these varied approaches. LAND is deliberately chosen for its multiple meanings: it refers to earth as a continent and element, as homeland or landscape, an idea of reality. The letter Z precedes it because its shape resonates with the aesthetic nuances of the exhibition: two parallel lines connected by a diagonal that both supports and divides. The entanglement of syntactic emptiness and semantic ambiguity in the title Z-LAND also plays a decisive role in the exhibited works.
Eno Henze, Mihai Grecu & Thibault Gleize, Heinz Hajek-Halke, and Michael Reisch all focus in Z-LAND on this “in-between” of fixed and unfixed connotations.
You and your friends are warmly invited to the opening on January 18, 2013, at 7 PM.
Michael Reisch’s work 8/020 (2010) is abstract and digitally generated. As the result of pure computer calculation, it has no real-world counterpart and is materially connected to genuine photography only through its paper support. Likewise, Hajek-Halke’s light graphic Never Again (~1965) uses neither a model nor a camera. Created through multiple direct exposures, it is technically close to the photogram but resists the inherent pictorial objecthood of that medium.
8/020 and Never Again function on one hand through visual association, but through their abstraction, evade any potential for ambiguity. Their formal rigor simultaneously sparks and suppresses expressivity. What they share is the theme of dissolution—Reisch from the real to the virtual, Hajek-Halke from the realistic to the material.
Mihai Grecu and Thibault Gleize’s video work EXLAND (2013) creates a world that is both fantastical and terrifying: deserted mountain ranges shrouded in dense fog, where distinctions between day and night vanish. A chilling soundscape accompanies the scene, intensified by the absurd appearance of flashing pink neon banners. Between mountain chains, glowing pictograms, and eerie mists, what remains is a disturbing tension—a foreboding of an overwhelming finale.
Grecu and Gleize, a Paris-based multimedia duo, produce in EXLAND a reality that, though seemingly grounded in mountains, fog, and color, resists any definitive topological attribution.
All four positions share a common intent: to render reality—long disassociated from photography and video art—newly tangible, not through representation, but through material. Despite the 50-year gap in art history between the works of Reisch, Henze, or Grecu and that of Hajek-Halke, they converge on one idea: to create a reality that arises more from form than from mere image. Be it in Reisch’s virtually constructed spaces, in Hajek-Halke’s peculiar worlds of things, in Henze’s deliberate norm violations, or in Grecu and Gleize’s ironic engagement with the sublime.

Installation Views