Reelleti Scheck

For the first time the artist Eric Meier presents current works in his hometown Frankfurt (Oder). Eric Meier's subject is the East German city. In photographic black and white, he shows urban spaces and architectural fragments in which signs of post-socialist transformation and the loss of a built social utopia have inscribed themselves. In the process, the photographs become indicators of an urban situation in transition, testifying equally to individual mythologies and collective recodifications or overformations. Although Frankfurt (Oder) is often the starting point for his photographic investigations, Meier is not concerned with documenting a specific city. Rather, he uses a quasi-archival sociological procedure by observing post-socialist urban spaces and describing them photographically. Humans are mostly absent, but visible through their civilizational traces, imprints, or gestures. In this way, Meier articulates in a visual-aesthetic way an emptiness or semantic void that also refers to a much-experienced intergenerational lack of linguistic exchange and incomprehension. As part of their emphatically high aesthetic, the photographic spaces and urban scenes are marked by cracks, fractures, destruction, decay, or neglect. This rupture continues in Meier's photographs and installations; a simultaneity of experiencing lost utopias and dealing with them in the future emerges. In the process, a third, aesthetic space opens up, whose temporality is located somewhere between utopia and dystopia in the present. For some years now, Meier has been expanding his photographic spectrum to include video works and multi-part spatial installations made of exposed aggregate concrete, second-hand textiles, and fused glass. In the video works, the person who is absent in the photographs reappears in altered form: In stage-like appearances, he counteracts the ideal image of East German masculinity or unmasks the AfD's use of language. Meier's rhetoric is multi-layered, but does not operate covertly. He exposes the status quo of dealing with urban as well as media public spaces, in which dehumanization and neglect are often a repressed part of reality. Second video work https://youtu.be/aZQagm3B5xQ (Parteiprogramm, 4k Video, 12:36min, 2021)