Aktivitoet
Amulet
Augenblick
Bestseller
Crossword
Labyrinth
Light Boxes
Marseille Imaginee, Marseille Realite
Boden Objects
Obsession
Kuenstlerdorf Shoeppingen
Abandoned House
Time-Out
Triumph
Room no.10

Soundbarrier
Labyrinth of Shoepping
Am Boden
Drawer

Sounbarrier
1996

Stefan Rasche
“Energetic Depots - On the New Works of Salah Saouli”

Filled with individual experiences and collective images, memory is a repository of disparate, unsorted data, an arena of changing perspectives and alliances. To activate it beyond its own structure, to give it a surface or a volume in order to grasp equally the definite and the indefinite, visible and invisible, is at the center of Salah Saouli’s artistic interest. With the obsession of an archaeologist he has over the past several years collected photographs, texts and other documents, to incorporate them into his multimedial objects and installations as fragmented material - often at the brink of legibility. Printed on flags or housed in shrine-like encasings, mounted on the wall, arranged in display cabinets or staged in spacious labyrinths, these remains, which have been recovered and reproduced complement one another across the individual works to comprise a visual depot which- complete with cracks and gaps, as well as thematic repetitions - is repeatedly excerpted and combined anew. Salah Saouli prefers to work with complex montages and multidimensional overlappings, with ways of focusing and renewed diffusion, to lend his material energetic form and associative significance without foregrounding its origin or historical places and times. In particular, it is the effects of war on people and cities that Salah Saouli has invoked as images of recollection, by using images of destroyed buildings or photos of missing persons.

An extract of “Energetic Depots - On the New Works of Salah Saouli”
Catalogne Salah Saouli in Schöppingen, 1996

from German by Alisa kotmair