Rey Akdogan (Heilbronn, Cologne, lives and works in New York) focuses her attention on the standardization of materials and perceptual processes that shape the visual present. Her works take on cross-media and often site-specific forms, moving between projection, sculpture, and installation.
Image gallery
Abstrakte schwarz-braun gefärbte Abbildung von Materialien au einem Dia
Akdogan investigates how atmospheres are created and how color, light, and material properties organize sensory experience and generate affective spaces. The materials she uses—color filters, printed plastics, packaging fragments—originate from industrial and scenographic contexts and, in their conventional contexts, serve to direct gaze and attention. In Akdogan's work, they break free from these fixed constraints, making the operational logic of these systems newly perceptible.
A central focus of the exhibition at Haus am Waldsee is Akdogan's Carousel series, created since 2010: Thin layers of color filters, Mylar, and transparent remnants are mounted in 35mm slides and rotate in the light of the projector. The resulting projections are not photographic images, but material overlays, excerpts, and fragments that modulate the uniformity of industrial surfaces.
With each rotation, tonal values shift: hues tilt, lines and structures find new orientations, and familiar textures dissolve into different rhythms. The familiar becomes enigmatic, yet remains bound to its material origin. This creates a field of transitions in which material and perception relate to one another in a new way.
For the Haus am Waldsee, a large group of these carousels is brought together for the first time, so that their tempos and shifts across the rooms coalesce into a polyphonic installation.
- Curated by Beatrice Hilke
