Juergen Staack: Left Behind,…Missing Pictures.

September 15 - October 28, 2006

Guest writer: Dr. Oliver Zybok, Braunschwieg University

Juergen Staack was born in 1978 in the former German Democratic Republic (Doberlug-Kirchhain). After an apprenticeship as a photographer, Staack went on to be a student of Thomas Ruff at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Düsseldorf, where he established the artist group FEHLSTELLE.

Left Behind,…Missing Pictures is an ongoing body of work consisting of a series of site specific projects dealing with art methodology, notions of traditional portrait photography, documentation, archival, performance, surveillance and installation.

Large format Polaroid portraits of a multitude of anonymous passer-by sitters de-familiarize a fine art tradition. The pictures are photo-documented and archived during a performance that has occurred in various locations around the globe, including Andorra, Palermo, Vilnius, Kaliningrad, Boston, Cairo, Paris, Basel and Beijing. The original photos are geographically displaced and left behind in public off-space installations that are surveilled, then taken away by the urban elements. Only a few pictures have made it back. A total of 325,312 pictures are missing. A display of missing pictures and a video streaming of a new public installation to take place in New York City will be presented at Space Other (Boston). Video collaboration with .

A companion to this exhibition is a text by Space Other guest writer Dr. Oliver Zybok, writer and independent curator based in Germany. Dr. Zybok has been curator of numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States, working with institutions such as the Domus Artium in Salamanca, the National Gallery in Prague, the Museum of Applied Sciences in Cologne, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, the Meilahti Art Museum in Helsinki, and the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg.