C-print,Untitled
(Remark on A. Busch's photographs)

Every sentence refers to another sentence, every image to one that precedes or follows it. It would not be entirely mistaken to presume that there is always a story behind them, but it would remove from view that which is visible, that which is particular to the surface of these photographs; that which appertains to them, beyond questions of cause and effect, as expressions of an distinctive event. Singular joy, singular shock, a sensation, almost momentary, of fatigue or irritation. As though violently broken out of the continuum of time that, in our world, is thought to be the basis of narration: first this, then that, and in between a link that joins past and future in a logical, a comprehensible manner. Nothing but hypotheses to which we have, for better or for worse, gotten used.

As what is outside the frame at the moment of exposure is no longer important, the image transforms into a kind of frozen cross-section without interfaces left or right, up or down-even though we can still think these interfaces as possibilities of narration that will bring a second, a third meaning into the scene. Or, rather, that will impose a meaning on the scene that does not in fact inhabit its elements. Which is nothing but to reduce them to parts of a whole that they are not and never intended to be. Instead of a 'Therefore,' or a 'Soon after,' which seem to offer cogent explanatory models to the beholder, he ought much rather to envisage his not-knowing, confronted as he is with an unknown territory in view of which he is as alone with himself and his perception as a first human being would be, standing before images of the world that defies immediate understanding, comprised as it is in an ongoing story. Enigmas of color and shape, unsettlingly vivid, figures and constellations in the secret of a photographic moment. Epiphanies of the present, which Astrid Busch reveals without rendering them more accessible by virtue of a commentary; re-diminishing them retrospectively, or abandoning them to the judgment of taste.

An oilcloth, a table, on it transparent glasses with pens in them, an older, beige-colored telephone, an open computer over which a man crouches, dressed in a shirt and a parka, his posture slightly torqued, in the foreground of a room that seems worn, used-up-cables are suspended from the ceiling, and one can discern a red arrow in the background that someone has casually sprayed on the wall. Small pieces of paper tacked to the wall on the side, above them a lamp is lit, the lampshade corrugated glass. Provisional, one immediately thinks, someone has ensconced himself in a provisional arrangement here in order to perform a task that bears no delay. No waiting, no seeking more ideal conditions. As though ideal conditions could be found at all for something that must be done precisely now. Yet the question as to why this is so, whence this urgency, does not arise any more than the question why one eats or drinks when one is hungry or thirsty, one's throat almost painfully dry.

Pure presence, pure event in an entirely contingent universe permeated by irreversible decay. A posture, a thought, a desire, a state of affairs (of mind) that simply come to pass, in certain situations, with irrefutable necessity, with the greatest intensity. That happen to one, banal and exciting like the absolutely real itself, if one knows how to see it, and thus to read it, and that means: to recognize it. Knows how to call it forth in a setting in which not only the photographer, the camera, and chance finds at this or that site are involved but also a magic that emerges from the consciousness that everything is as provisional as it is rational, that plans exist only to be thwarted, and that no order will endure other than an order of passionate condensation and devotion, one of suddenness and flight, the intoxicating disorder of sleep, of dreams, of art.

This I was, this I could be. This I would like to be, an other who is composed of nothing but a longing and the capacity to follow it at any time. To lose oneself, like the figures in Busch's photographs, into a moment of absent-minded concentration, into the brittle beauty of the most quotidian spaces and things. Nothing more is needed to evoke the potentials of the human in beguiling simplicity, freeze-frames that, literally, lack nothing, no story that were located outside of them. Which one would need to know in the attempt, still futile, to decode their enigmatic insistence, traces that neither have a destination nor run in a circle, landscapes of the soul that one crosses incessantly without ever reaching an end; true images that, like true sentences, stand alone. A sleeping woman on a black leather couch, her arm, drunken with dream, touching the red carpet. A man, crouching over his laptop. A woman sitting on the floor, her legs spread, peering into the sleeve of her trench coat as though something of importance were hidden there. Who are these people if not each one of us, at those moments when we are fused with our impulses? Those moments in the focus of the objective when we no longer have a choice. This is precisely how it is, now, none different; look.

Ulrich Peltzer 2006

Press release "Wide angels" Stedefreund 2008

Swirling snow, a light in the fog, shadowy figures in the darkness, Astrid Busch's photographs can be read as well-composed stills from a film production whose plot remains withheld from us. Frozen moments and suggestions of scenes. What has happened, and what is going to happen? We are witnesses to events we cannot decipher. As we know, horror begins when the familiar starts to look strange and we are left alone with our own psyches and projections. Thanks to our familiarity with the repertoire of film, Busch's images appear as interrupted narratives of light and shadow; arrested, they refer to precisely that which is invisible and which we expect or foresee. A video installation intensifies the air of mystery and our unease in the space. The images take on moving shapes without satisfying hopes of causal or linear resolution. Again and again we fall into a web of cryptic allusions, feeling like characters in our own dream.

Carla Orthen 2008