The exhibition "Training Images" by Philipp Goldbach at the H2 - Center for Contemporary Art in the Glaspalast brings together well over half a million physical images. Around ten years ago, the Cologne-based artist began recycling entire slide libraries with photographic reproductions of artworks from universities, classic 35 mm slides that have become superfluous as teaching aids due to digitization and are about to be disposed of worldwide.
Goldbach's installations with this analog film material are snapshots and symbols of an epochal media change in the production and use of images. They stage the art history slides between their systematic arrangement in expansive image databases and their dissolution. At the same time, Philipp Goldbach uses the old image carriers to create impressive forms for the new, supposedly disembodied universe of digital images, thus posing the artistic question: Which images do we trust?
In addition to slide collections from other universities and teaching personalities, a central work in the exhibition contains the decommissioned slide library of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, one of the most important international art history institutes, which was most recently given to Goldbach.
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