„Through glass walls you can see the stars and the rain“.
Gilles Ivain 1953
CREATE – little artfully spray-painted on a ramp, next to it the more professional stencil of a single inline skater, on the other side loudspeakers and a rubbish bin in whose shelter dandelions and grasses grow, foliage accumulates. In the foreground, a manhole cover has been stencilled and decorative posters have been placed on a wall cut from the left edge of the picture. On the ramp is a camera, which motivically picks up an advertisement in the background, but also directs the perspective out of the photo towards me, making the request CREATE more urgent. Above the ramp, a modern security door, and smooth surfaces that suggest a new architecture. It is a corner in the urban space that Timo Hinze motifically prefaces his exhibition work, and it is his artistic work that he stages here. Since his studies at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, Timo Hinze has been photographing the urban surface. He observes and documents building fences and advertising spaces, façades and clandestinely spray-painted comments in equal measure. One gets the impression that he is concerned with capturing scenes that seem random, intentional and unintentional settings that tell a revealing story about the daily imprinting and programming in urban space.
For the video work „Post-it“, for example, Timo Hinze looked for images and short messages that are stuck in a completely analogue way with post-its from the inside on the window panes of office buildings. From the perspective of the pedestrian, he films the grid graphics on the rows of windows on the upper floors, sometimes also following communications from opposite building fronts. At first glance, this vernacular creativity seems amusing, encouraging participation and commentary. At the same time, the spatial distance and perspective from which Timo Hinze records his motifs is irritating. For it is not at all easy to understand the signs, let alone to answer them. Used as a display, the windows become a one-sided medium for sending signals to the outside world. What also becomes clear here, however, are the restrictions on communication imposed by the spatial and temporal organisation of the working day behind hermetic glass facades.
Timo Hinze is not only interested in everyday life in modern office worlds. He also follows the traces of his parents‘ gardening or the chance encounters of various things on the dining and working table in his flat. These are banal settings that nevertheless seem to possess a mysterious information value. As if one were looking with archaeological interest at the traces of everyday life, and reconstructing the world from the remains, from the placement of things.
A counterpoint to the media of photography and video are small clay figures, in which Timo Hinze realises a handicraft creation process that has a long tradition. However, he avoids the pathetic gesture of creation, forming figures out of earth, in that his creatures are less graceful and less productively occupied with lying down. However, they go through this in all its facets: They sleep or laze, they rest or are sick, and they clearly stand out against the urban actionism that Timo Hinze thematises in his photo series. But after all, it is also work to stand up, to move from the vertical to the horizontal. And with this movement, the clay figures become symbols of a new beginning that ultimately leads to the urban forays.
Matilda Felix Kuratorin, Sammlung Marx, Berlin
