Axis: Exhibition text for Kurt Fritsche and Joshua Gottmans at b10b, Düsseldorf, 2024

Her eyes are staring, the instrument raised, her skinny fingers poised. This is how one pictures the angel of history. She is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, the angel of history sees only a single catastrophe, a bristling image, rendering and re-rendering, sample stacked into sample – endlessly refining a perfect articulation of collapse. The angel would like to stay. She would like to send a simple melody drifting into the wreckage. She would like to take it all apart, lay it out piece by piece, all loose and undecided. But a storm is blowing from Paradise. It has caught her little body with such force she cannot resist. Inexorably she is propelled into the future, a future to which her back is turned, while before her eyes the image grows dense and slick with detail.   

Outside the afternoon is thick emulsion white. No one around but you and the delivery riders, the sound of their bike spokes ticking as they bump over drains and slink through red lights. Strapped to each hunched spine is an anonymous warmth, swaddled in translucent folds and styrofoam shells, steaming morsels pedalled across town with banal, unceasing urgency. Watching these dispatches criss-cross your vision, you like to imagine each foil-lined box as a little animated glow, a network of many animated glows, each pulsing their way across the vesseled map of the city like a diagrammed body in a medicine advert. Locating a throbbing temple, an aching limb, the glow will spread, blink, flare and disperse: the body sighs then straightens with relief. 

Diesel moves dutifully through the organs of a bus. As you cross the street your throat receives the oily airborne residue. You’re not sure if you’ve ever actually seen diesel in liquid form, just smelt it on the hot grey breath of a bus, or felt it purr through the silent car while a parent fills the tank, or rubbed its stain from a fingertip after doodling faces in murky windscreens. So much new language was entering your vocabulary at that age. Words like exhaust – not as in fatigue, but output, expulsion, waste. Also Fumes. Thick at first with that fat F sound sinking into itself, arriving at the padded fold of an M. You remember a certain compulsion to trace a clean pink fingertip through the dark grey filth. Not merely the childish glee of making something ‘dirty’, but a solemn, knowing pleasure. Something known but not quite yet understood. Complicity perhaps. This dark, viscous, substance – a toxic yet inevitable emission of the grown-up world – and your inevitable future in it.

Installation view of Untitled, 2023 silver gelatine print. Image courtesy of Kurt Fritsche and Joshua Gottmans.