Cabinet exhibition
Monika Bertermann

The PhotographyCollection – Schloss Kummerow presents the temporary exhibition TRANSFORMATIONEN by Monika Bertermann. The cabinet exhibition shows works with X-ray images.

Dialogue between the artist Monika Bertermann and Juliane Henke from the Photographic Collection – Schloss Kummerow

1. Ms. Bertermann, you work with an extraordinary material to create your works of art, how did it come about? And what is your intension/relationship with this material?

MB: For some years now, the X-ray image has been the focus of my artistic engagement with the topic of “transformation processes”. More than 20 years ago, the traditional X-ray image, as a diagnostic agent in the imaging process, was supplanted by digital technology. Since I worked for many years in a medium-sized medical profession, analog X-rays of my working environment and I started collecting old, medically unrelevant images. These films have a special aesthetic appeal. After all, they are concentrated on the essentials and only represent light and shadow. The feel of the films also offers various experimental design options.

2. The title of your exhibition is “Transformations”. This term includes modification, renewal or even redesign. How do these terms relate to your work?

MB: As already mentioned, the medical technology redesign into more modern diagnostic methods changed the traditional. Nothing remains as it is. Old things are replaced by new ones. New things are constantly on the “becoming”. I, too, am changing existing X-ray image surfaces. First I used it as a painting ground, later for experimental material prints, collages and stencil techniques. I destroy and cut them, assemble the resulting fragments into new image objects and installations. Completely new image statements are created.

3. The conventional X-ray image shows an image of the three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface. So there are certainly relationships with photography. In your works, you lead this two-dimensioning back into the physical – give them a form again. Are these forms influenced by the material and its content?

MB: The analog X-ray image shows the image of X-rays on a two-dimensional, double-sided coated photo film. Fixed structures remain transparent on the image, allowing for light incidence similar to a window pane. The flexibility of the film material and its strength allow me to assemble the images into objects, to make them body-like again. They are simple geometric shapes with no relation to human bodies. I use the partial transparency, with the play of the coming light, in terms of design. The focus is exclusively on the material, illustrations are irrelevant.