Introduction

Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart is presenting the first German solo exhibition of Dutch video artist Peter Bogers (born 1956) from November 4, 2006 – January 7, 2007. The show features a total of eleven video objects, video sculptures, and video installations created between 1992 and 2006.
 
Peter Bogers has executed the aesthetic and technical possibilities offered by the video medium like hardly any other artist. His work focuses on the exploration of psychological and physical presences of the body (and of the human being) under the conditions of its medial reproducibility in film and moving pictures respectively.

Bogers, who works both with his own video recordings and found footage, dissects the structure of the film down to the single frame. In countless cuts he disassembles and reassembles everyday, usually profane actions, thereby shifting them into a different reality that is, at the same time, inherent in the film images: a reality, then, whose appearance has only become possible under the conditions of technical reproduction.

Whereas video clips established a mode of film cutting to accelerate pictorial worlds, Bogers uses fragmentation to slow down and stretch the flow of images. What film usually hides from our perception, i.e. the single frame, becomes Bogers’ raw material, that he uses to penetrate the surfaces of the media and thus bring those “ghosts” into play that the image machines produce.

Sound and noise, for example breathing, a heart-beat or the human voice, play a key role in the works of Peter Bogers, who began his career as a performance artist. They are subjected to the same aesthetic shifts as the video image.

Peter Bogers’ works have been on show at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Casino Luxemburg, at the National Gallery of Prague, and at the Bucharest Biennale, among others.