500 Postcards by Roland Geissel
PUBLISHED April 21st, 2014 08:14 am | UPDATED May 9th, 2018 03:13 am
An e x h i b i t i o n b y R o l a n d G e i s s e l
opening 22 May 2014 at 7pm
By giving exhibition space to the local art scene, the German Centre Singapore actively promotes the link of innovation and art as products of creative minds.
The 500 postcards exhibition is an on-going project which is half deliberate and half fortuitous. The deliberate acts are in the photographs I took and the postcards I wrote, the incidental is the combination of the
two into one exhibition.
In the spring of 2012 I was invited to show some work in Berlin as part of an exhibition on identity. I decided to send a series of postcards from Singapore, each with a single observation on it. A stamp set was used to
print my reflections on my host country. From May 1, 2012 to September 15, 2013 I posted a card every day. I was aware that it is not possible to tell a full story in just one sentence. So I had to be deliberate with my
choices, mostly fragments and thoughts which came to me while I was adjusting to life in Singapore. I make no claim to their objectivity or completeness.
My photographs date back to the time I was living in Shanghai in 2007. My curiosity was raised as to the architectural influences on the buildings I was surrounded with. Some buildings seem to be completely
clandestine as to their purpose; others showed an unusual mix of architectural styles. At first I took pictures of these buildings for their –from a Western point of view- visual oddities, but soon I became
fascinated with other unique aspects of Shanghai architecture. For a while I just captured these impressions in my photographs. Then quite suddenly they revealed their beauty to me. I started to investigate the
story behind the building and learned about characteristics of modern Chinese architecture. When I came to Singapore I continued my quest to discover a culture in a building.
The postcards and the architectural photographs are therefore not actually part of one project. They are more or less the results of my left and right brain’s separate attempt to understand the world.
