materialoutpost

materialoutpost, produced on the occasion of the exhibition Time Without End at Fluentum, builds on D’Ette Nogle’s earlier video work materialschrank (2020). For this, she picked Sigmar Polke’s painting Schrank (1963) and the artistic movement of Capitalist Realism, which Polke co-founded, as a departing point from which various post-war historical and pop-cultural references enter into an open dialog. As a continuation, materialoutpost sets out from the former U.S. army cinema Outpost in Berlin-Dahlem, also known as “Little America” during the post-1945 U.S. occupation. The title playfully indicates the thematic tenor of the video work in two ways: the Outpost, which in its function as a cinema brought products of cultural output to Berlin, here serves as the basis for episodically following traces of U.S. foreign policies from the postwar period to its contemporary idiosyncratic manifestations by means of narrative modes of popular culture and Hollywood cinema.

The dynamic interlinking of materials is orchestrated by Nogle’s off-screen voice, which, in combination with rhythmically inserted text commentaries, imbues materialoutpost with the characteristic touch of an equally didactic and compelling lecture performance. There is a method to the way Nogle repeatedly brings her own position as the speaker into focus: as an artist and a teacher, she is interested in the structural and economic conditionality of art production and education, within which she considers her own artistic practice embedded and due to which no outside, distanced perspective is possible. By revealing her point of view, Nogle’s practice offers a rich protocol of critical tools to examine the creation, representation, and mediation of historical and social narratives, while opening up vistas of untapped potential underlying its material.