Untitled 2005

This is a photograph by Heimo Zobernig, and it's a head-scratcher. He’s a funny one; it can be hard to know what he's really after. I imagine him wandering around a deserted office space and coming across this stack of projector screens and thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what I can do with this?” And what does he do? Well, he arranges them just so, creating this minimalist, almost architectural composition. It makes me think about formalism in painting, and how the arrangement of shapes and colours can be interesting in and of itself. The color palette is very basic: whites, greys, and blacks. The screens are slightly different shades, which adds a subtle complexity to the photograph. It also reminds me of older modernist grids such as Mondrian's. These screens are blank, they are ready for something to be projected onto them. But what? Is Zobernig saying something about the nature of perception, and how we see what we expect to see? Is he implying that art is a kind of screen onto which we project our desires, fears, and expectations?