Heiko Schaefer

The Work in and on Processing / Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen

Heiko Schaefer
The Work in and on Processing / Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen

25 October 2019 — 17 November 2019

Curator: Anna Zaitseva
The exhibition is part of the Moscow-Düsseldorf cultural exchange programme

For his recent works, Heiko Schaefer visited textile factories in France, Germany and most recently, Russia. While using a standardised method of focusing on and depicting a specific process in textile production, Schaefer tries to grasp sets of realities, social relations and production techniques. With the use of specific photographic techniques, all informed by realist and conceptual photography, as well as video, he creates numerous sequences of small images. In ‘Travailler avec les chariot bobines,’ made from 2015–2017 at the Noyon factory and the Codentel Factory in Calais, France, the author describes the specific steps of preparing so-called chariot bobines, a precision-engineered bobbin which plays an important role in the production of the Dentelle de Calais (‘Lace made in Calais’). In ‘Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen’ (‘The Work in and on Processing’), which originated from several visits to two weaving companies in Wuppertal, Germany, the author depicts the control, measurement and minimal patching that takes place in a specialised production division, the so-called ‘Aufmachung’ (‘processing’), which comes right after the actual weaving process. The present exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum also takes the title ‘Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen’: for this edition, Schaefer also visited the technical divisions at the Trekhgornaya Manufaktura company’s production sites in Moscow. This short visit resulted in new photographs, which are presented at MAMM. You can see the final control of the textiles right after the folding process as well as the production of textile samples. Two artist’s books produced in Wuppertal and in Calais serve as another part of the exhibition.

With this search and research, Schaefer tries to come to grips with a bundle of threads laid out as early as 1845 in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ — a text by Friedrich Engels, which might be followed by the ideas in ‘For Marx,’ written in 1965 by Louis Althusser, and the contemporary theories of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

In referring to discourses and terms such as the historical temporality of the dialectical form of the image or the temporalized atemporality (Peter Osborne), the author tries to build up spaces in order to review them collectively and combine that review with a visit with a friend to theTrekhgornaya Manufaktura.

‘Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen,’ which was shot in Germany, has already been exhibited this year at the Galerie der Gegenwart, Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster.

The author wants to thank Moscow’s Trekhgornaya Manufaktura Company for their openness and support, which made it possible to expand ‘Die Arbeit in und an Aufmachungen’ with new material.