Hubbard / Birchler

Ever since Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler started working

together as an artistic duo in the mediums of sculpture, photography,

and film, they have had a particular interest in giving their art a

narrative dimension. Yet their narrations are almost always fragmentary,

in suspended animation as it were, like the objects in the multipart

photographic series “Falling Down” (1996). Bank notes, ladies’ shoes, a

coffee cup, and a book all slipping from people’s grasp attest to the

loss of control by male and female protagonists. It is as if, by means of

meticulous stage direction, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive

moment”—the moment captured in a photograph that usually remains

hidden from the naked eye—were here being shown to be a myth.

Hubbard / Birchler’s staged scenarios are first and foremost analog

images constructed for the camera; utilizing an explicitly cinematographic

language they evoke specific mini-dramas—as in the case

of the young man who has just alighted from a Greyhound Bus with

all his worldly goods, seemingly ready to embark on a new life.

Hubbard / Birchler’s interest in an affirmative language of pop

culture is seen again in “Stripping” (1998), their next, large-format

photographic series, in which it seems we are given glimpses of the

female protagonist in a private, ambivalent moment. The artificiality of

the film set along with the vertical and horizontal bands dividing

particular images inevitably activate the potential for illusion associated

with cinema and moving pictures. Thus it hardly comes as a surprise

that not long afterward Hubbard / Birchler turned their attention

to cinema facades in their “Filmstills” (2002), and started to work on

video and film projects.

In so doing Hubbard / Birchler neither altered their pictorial

language, nor did they abandon their practice of staging images.

Right from the outset, through their photographs and films, their works

have always served them as a means to engage in an analytic

exploration of the limits of the medium in question. Hubbard / Birchler

have always been fascinated by the margins of photography, by the

lack of focus of this medium, which both produces meaning and

instigates a narrative moment, as do the objects suspended in mid-air

in “Falling Down. ” Hubbard / Birchler use the medium’s autonomy

to reinforce the suggestive powers of their cinematic language and, in

so doing, create mysterious, poetic images.

Philipp Kaiser