Liverpool Biennial - Jakob Kolding

This week I visited Liverpool to have a look at the Liverpool Biennial. I was quite interested in the work of Jakob Kolding, which I found in the Bluecoat's exhibition space. Inspired by modernist architecture and city life; Kolding works with collage and collective imagery, such as pop-cultural sources like music and football. Kolding is interested in the idea of 'local identity', and creates posters and maquettes based around this theme.

As I walked into his exhibition the first thing I noticed was the lack of colour, all of Kolding's selected work was black-and-white. A lot of the work is also quite minimalist in nature - sometimes with only a few small images on a page. Generally his work has the feel of old newspapers; a lot of the images are pixelated as though they are small images found from secondary sources which have been enlarged, reducing the picture quality. The connotations with architecture are strong - his work is very structured, using bold designs and layouts, and he also creates cardboard maquettes which immediately remind me of an architect's model. It's the more minimalist prints that I find the most interesting. I think they're simple and effective, and relate to themes that I am looking at in my own practice. The large amount of white space in the images makes me think of the absence of memory, and the use of pop-culture/secondary imagery, makes me think of collective memory and the idea of shared experience. In my own work I generally work with layered rectangles which mirror the dimensions of standard photographs, as I am interested in the relationship between photography and memory, but Kolding carefully cuts around details that he wants to display. I would like to try this technique of cutting around the details of images I am collaging, so that I am clearly selecting parts of an image, creating isolated parts of a memory.