Viktoria Binschtok studied with Timm Rautert in Leipzig. She featured in his Meisterklasseshow of 2006, then in the 2016 exhibition Caméra(auto)contrôle, both at the CPG. She has developed a fascinating skein of confusion between digital reality and analogue virtuality while at the same time questioning our customary ways of perceiving. In her work Viktoria Binschtok questions the medium and its codes. She starts from the acknowledgement that a phot [...]
Viktoria Binschtok studied with Timm Rautert in Leipzig. She featured in his Meisterklasseshow of 2006, then in the 2016 exhibition Caméra(auto)contrôle, both at the CPG. She has developed a fascinating skein of confusion between digital reality and analogue virtuality while at the same time questioning our customary ways of perceiving. In her work Viktoria Binschtok questions the medium and its codes. She starts from the acknowledgement that a photograph is not a representation of reality, just a reference. In 2002, for example, she was buying globes on the internet and exhibiting them in their shipping carton while showing only photos of the globes that are posted on eBay. With World as a Detail, she continues to make use of the internet, Google Street View to be precise, as her prime purveyor of images. Countering the platitude of downloaded images, which she enlarges as black-and-white prints in the usual format of street photography, Binschtok goes to the very site in question to lend her shots a depth that bears no comparison with Google Street View images.
She literally materialises the incessant flow of Internet pictures by reconstructing an online image into a high-resolution version, as in the Networked Imagesseries to which Legs and Knives belongs. This photomontage is broken down into four vertical representations. The two central elements, showing legs clad in fishnet stockings, are adjoined on either side by scaled-up Internet pictures of box cutters, a handle repeating the same motif as the stockings.