Texts
A selection from 1990 on
Barbara Lanati – 1990
[...] Döhne works on memory and its extinction, the weight of memory and its potential, partly reprocessing, and, thereby taking position of the one who accepts the wounds left by history in the body of the collective imagination. Going beyond the actual tragedy of history, key terms of the vocabulary are being formed which will construct the language of today. [...]
David Perez – 1992
[...] An avalanche of images buries the sense of history, which desperately wants to be forgotten, or, as some clear-sighted people claim, will be overcome. Faced with this ghost of ice, which is trying to turn memory into an empty accumulation of coarse images, we are left with the preservation of a nearly silent rumor about some images that are mixing in our memory. [...]
Rüdiger Hasse – 1998
[...] With its subtle intelligence the metaphor of the mere scene is impeded by the construction as a sculpture. [...] The aesthetic strategy is called incorporation. The wax block incorporates the image within itself and grants it the transition into space as a material – enabling it thereby to take form in a different way. [...]
José Ignacio Maldonado – 1998
[...] The work is sober, because in a surprising cold-bloodedness it shows such disturbing scenes that we are compelled to see in the selection of the images a section, an autopsy. Then, the work is confusing, because it throws the viewer off track because by changing the cut the boundary is renewed, because the original path of the photographic shot is deflected. [...]
Amine Haase – 1999
[...] The motive is a white carnation on a grave stone. That seems to lay itself like a snow flake onto our memory.
[...] The collective memory seems to petrify under the burden of proof of the documentated testimonies. Art can save us from stagnation. Markus Döhne succeeds with gentle pressure, which is no more serious than frozen tears.
Sabine Müller – 2002
[...] He does not reject the reproducibility of images, but he attempts to archive something that one could call their reauratization using graphic means. The material for this undertaking is supplied by the artistic medium most severely affected by its own reproducibility, namely photography. [...]
Amine Haase – 2005
[...] They are only vaguely recognizable as people, no shadows, but as figures, illuminated from within, no bright apparitions, rather earth worms, threatening, threatened, as in the afterglow of the atomic bomb. Frontier workers, warning signs of a future of global migrations, burned into our eye and brain. [...]
Christel Wester – 2005
[...] It may be a coincidence that Markus Döhne’s series of works entitled Arbeitsspeicher is held in shades of green. [...] The dull green light and the dark green linoleum are certain marginal details in Peter Weiss’s opus magnum and probably Markus Döhne does not think of them today any more, some twenty years after having read the book. [...]
Stefanie Endlich, Angelika Kettelhack, Walter Vitt – 2007
[...] Thus, in a both encrypted and suggestive manner, a connecting line is created between the historic occasion and today's world of experience of the viewer who discovers that the utopias and feelings of that time did not disappear, but are significantly changed and need to be grasped anew. By way of a deliberate distance, a new form of approach is enabled. [...]
Susanne Greinke – 2008
[...] While retaining the information of the images, they have been enlarged and changed in color. Despite increasing blurring one gets the impression that the actual picture information of the starting material has become even more apparent by the process of artistic appropriation. By doing so he poses the question of the semantic potential of images. [...]
Bodo Morawe – 2008
[...] At the same time, speaking with Brecht, he posesses the list of a political citizen which is required in order to not only recognize the truth, but also to spread it. [...] The left melancholy is alien to him. [...] For, he has a clear political and historical consciousness. His Green Screens are [...] a sure sign for that. As soon as the winds blow, why should the artist hesitate to put an all-weather sail for his contemporaries. Since the political climate — or shall we say bluntly: the era — denies this for the time being, he makes us one of sticks and tarpaulin.
Hans-Peter Riese – 2008
[...] Only by this increase of truth achieved through art the political level is neutralised and, thus, reveals itself as such. [...] He also proves to be a graphic artist with an almost unerring instinct for the correct transformation of reality into art. His work – although the content being linked to by now over-dramaticized events of history – lacks any pathetics, and any pathos. [...]
Klaus Findl – 2013
[…] Back further up. […] Talking about art usually mimics the movement of space travel, insofar as this is a metaphor for the conquest of higher spheres in the scientific age. Talking about art usually comes from above and, as such, is often totally out of line. Anyone who has attended more than two exhibition openings knows this. Because this above has usually been reached with spaceships built by others. […]
Markus Döhne and Res Ingold – 2013
[…] Gazing at the starry sky has always awakened longings. It took nearly 100 years for the vision of Jules Verne's Journey to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune, Paris 1865), at the height of the Cold War, to finally be realized. […] The 26th Planetary Congress of the Association of Space Explorers [ASE] will take place in Cologne during the first week of July. At this gathering of living astronauts (and veterans), who called themselves “Citizens of Space – Guardians of the Earth” when their club was founded in 1983, ideas about the future use of space will be exchanged and propagated. Pragmatic commercial models of thought that have nothing in common with Verne’s visions. […]
Christel Wester – 2015
[…] I imagine him taking up his observation post on the living room sofa at 5 p.m. on July 20, his eyes feverish, and not only from his measles infection. That afternoon, the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 expedition begins on West German television, a mission that is to last 28 hours. When Neil A. Armstrong sets foot on the moon at 3:54 a.m. CET on the night of July 21, it is not only a giant leap for humanity, as the astronaut himself proclaimed to the world from the moon. The moon landing is also a veritable initiatory event in media history: […]
Res Ingold – 2015
[…] Even metaphorical space travel begins in the mind. The cosmos may be infinite, but so is a satellite and a launch vehicle. Humboldt's great narrative is called Kosmos just like a cinema in Berlin or a book publisher. The universe is merely a conceptual space outside the Earth's atmosphere, arbitrarily defined as extending above an altitude of 100 kilometers. This imaginary Earth wobbles around somewhere at the edge of space. […]
Roman Zieglgänsberger – 2015
[…] The memory of the event seems to slide like rain off the mirror-smooth purple-black surface of the image, and even we, despite the seemingly incorruptible photograph, have long since lost it. Who was Alan Shepard, since in the general consciousness there is really only one Yuri Gagarin and one Neil Armstrong? It seems to be confirmed: the first counts, no one else. […]
Susanne Greinke – 2015