Natalie Czech (born 1976 in Neuss, lives in Berlin) is showing her two new series of photographs, Poems by Repetition and Voyelles, in the Remise at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. In these as well as in many others of her photographs, poetry makes up a fundamental component of her motif. Reading in such diverse media as newspapers, picture books and e-books, the artist marks individual words with the intent of uncovering bit by bit the poems that are concealed within the text. She subsequently photographs the images produced by this subjective act of reading, weaving them into an “allegory of reading.”

In her Poems by Repetition (2013) series, Natalie Czech expands this idea to encompass an “allegory of writing.” The starting point for the new photographs is Gertrude Stein’s theatre text Saints and Singing(1922), which focuses on repetition as a rhetorical stylistic devise and the wide range of its applications. Employed in a narrative, it facilitates the development of a dynamic, processual and rhythmizing form that leads to a tonal composition in the space—comparable to an echo or a refrain. To this end, Czech has selected poems by such writers as Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsburg that utilize repetition stylistically. In order to depict them photographically, she makes use for example of a record cover by Pink Floyd, dance step instructions or an iPad advertising photograph. But it is first the multiple illustrations of the motif that are strung together in a group that enable the concealed poem to become visible and legible with the assistance of colored markings. In the case of A poem by repetition by Gertrude Stein, for example, an interview on four tablet computers can be seen that deals with diverse theses on music by German philosophers (Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel). Not only do contentual references to the respective poem emerge in the individual works from the meticulously researched and selected text fragments but to music in equal measure as well.

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