Immer Noch Sturm

Over  the  past  decade  Peter  Piller  has  compiled  thousands  of  images  –from  unspectacular  newspaper  photographs  to  old  postcards  or  abandoned archives. His body of work has been created through re‐ordering and staging new and existing images, giving them a new meaning through  this  re‐arrangements  and  the  making  of  unexpected  associations.  Piller’s  archivistic  and  archaeological  operations  on  this  visual  material provide a way of understanding how meaning is produced through pictures.In Peter Piller’s own words: “Collecting for me is often a stirring up, not an answering of questions. This is what interests me so much about it. And naturally I am often astonished by how an interest in a seemingly mundane subject can become more and more complex, and how much more information images contain than one would think at first glance”.*For his fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD, Peter Piller presents a new, never shown to date, archive photographic series, a constellation of 30 archival  black  and  white  prints  which  he  groups  under  the  title  Immer  noch  Sturm  (Still  Storming).  The  work  combines  images  of  exposed,  desolate, bald landscapes with images of rough seas. They are all found images collected from old postcards showing scenes of land after war “storms” during World War I and old books published in the same period. Despite the supposedly opposed nature of the land and the sea views,  the  two  sets  of  images blend  in  a  kind  of  romantic  image  of  a  “storming”  scape,  where  some  similarities  between  the  two  kinds  of  images can be found. The reference to the classic representations of war landscapes in the history of painting is probably evident.