Framstr 7 Berlin; june 11th - june 25th 2016LAST CALL
Stahl's vision is infected by the metamorphosis which is the status quo of his home city Berlin: always changing, never complete, a landscape of sketches and scars, a city which can not be captured in any single moment, a city always wandering between a somnambulist past and an illusion of future in the search for its vast urban soul.
Wherever Stahl may go, be it the spaces of collective experience, or the intimate encounters of his own life, this transcendental search haunts his pictures. A desire to capture a definitive proof of one's own existence is overthrown by the impossibility of this task. Persons becoming phantasms; concrete dissolving into an abstract absence of definite form; buildings levitating like dreams; abandoned bodies forming into landscapes; faces emerging or dissolving: all things frozen in the hesitation between manifesting themselves, transforming into something different, or disintegrating; between being half- remembered or half-forgotten. Stahl's images are glimpses at an absence of definite boundaries of the material form and of the self.
It seems a continuation of this process to learn that some of the negatives of the photographs exhibited have been lost. The prints are like fake tattoos on the body of time, fading. Just like the images they carry, just like a perception of an image, they are impossible to retain. What remains are momentary, incomplete, but relevant evidences of a repeatedly manifested existence.
Hanna Slak