Running – it’s a circle

Running – it’s a circle
from the text of the exhibition at Kunstverein Dessau 2015

Cornelia Wieg, Moritzburg Art Museum, Halle

Running – it’s a circle describes Nancy Jahn’s artistic form of movement. It would be possible to call this movement “development”, but in its purposefulness it misses the essence of her work: circle and straight line are simultaneously there and equally strong, so that one could perhaps speak of an irregularly circling approximation – in order to somehow capture the paradox of this artistic form of movement in a word picture. And what is circled? I would say: the secret of reality that reaches deeper than our knowledge and is stranger to us than we think in view of its surfaces.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet and director who lamented the disappearance of the popular Italian dialects as one of the many losses of intuitive, subjective world connectedness, does not speak of this mysterious reality as an explanation, but as a “fabulation” towards it in “Affabulazione” (1972).

“[…] the reality that escapes me:
And I do not have to solve it, because it is not a riddle:
I have to get to know it – touch it, see it and hear it –
Because she’s a secret…”
Nancy Jahn’s work gropes its way along the edges of existence, in the grey zones of which the paths of secondary phenomena of the world slowly lean towards the abyss of oblivion. She directs her gaze to the moments that light up in the twilight, small events shortly before disappearing. She releases remaining things that have become ridiculous to the brutally accelerating present, little jars in which there are still remnants of fate, cautiously removed from their predetermined social aesthetics. She makes them unintentional and relieves them of the burden of time that makes them seem so dead to us. A not-so-small twist, a shift in perspective, carried out with the determination and warming calculation of an affection into which no contempt of the aesthetics of the past mixes, produce something that resolves awkwardness and refreshes our perception – a small, sure aesthetic operation that discovers and renews the breath of beauty. An offer that is on the edge of our habits of seeing, on the edge of our consciousness, on the edge of our knowledge-seeking gaze, as if caught out of the corner of our eye.
Pictures from Estonia, just standing diaphanously before our eyes for a moment to go out again: the many forms of snow and ice remains, carelessly pushed aside, with their complex structures in wonderful diversity, small cosmos – always in change, melting, crumbling, transient. The traces of feet, transient impressions of our existence, our walking, our movement. Traces of reality, traces of a mystery …