Sergej Vutuc - Something in Between
25 June—30 July 2011
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin

Galerie Michael Janssen is pleased to announce its first exhibition by Sergej Vutuc entitled Something in between.

On view is a series of unique hand printed black and white photographs on Baryt paper from 2010. Garages, junk fields, containers, an abandoned quarterpipe turned upside down, dirty mattresses and rubble are seen through a cloudy scrim of film.

Vutuc makes his own prints putting garbage between the light and the paper, scratching and interfering with the image. Just as the images themselves, many of the dilapidated buildings depicted bear scrapes, scratches and wheel traces; signs that the structures have been put into „good use,“ appropriated and re-invented by skateboarders.

Since the mid 1990s Vutuc has been engaged in the punk and skateboarding community and the aesthetics and philosophies of these DIY-cultures have granted his work a distinct character. Skateboarding is an undeniable part of all this, but the board here might better be understood as a vehicle, than a sporting tool or past time.

Vutuc’s work reafirms that the skateboarder is not a detached voyeur of urban modernity. He has to constantly engage with his environment, re-invent and make new use out of it. His gaze, like Vutuc’s, is a nomadic one. It is always searching for things that are usable, beautiful or just plain fun, things he can invest himself in. These fragments become the raw material for stories the „mouth can never say,“ stories privileged for the eye.

There is seldom anything monumental or grandiose in Vutuc’s photographs. Just as in the skateboard pictures, his focus is directed on the small things surrounding him. The events he documents are therefore never the famboyant stunts or the loud and dramatic „big moments.“ They are deeply af formative and at the core of this sub-cultural scene from which his work grew. It is this realization that whatever you have grown up with, isn’t something you are stuck with. Every situation, like the city itself, is adaptable.

Something in between has recently been published in a catalogue with the same title by the publishing house Snoeck.

Sergej Vutuc, Something in Between, Installation view, 2011, Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin