The photographs of these vigils were taken on unintentional walks in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, the Rosenthaler Vorstadt and the Museum Island in Mitte. The silence of concealing labyrinths of the night had always attracted me, also because here the outer sealing off against the inner gaze, this banal expression of contemporary architecture no longer remains dominant. The inner and outer moods experienced on those walks, the astonishing sensation of being looked at by a found scenery, form the starting point for the creation of the pictures. Involving myself in reading these moods and feelings in the sense of Proust as signs of laws and ideas that need to be transformed into an intellectual equivalent, I was tempted to visualise the impressions.
In their dubious luminosity, the works document the visible of a nocturnal world and at the same time a hiddenness that is hinted at in the predominant sfumato of the photographs. A time-relativising mood grants that oblivious view of the captured scenery that allows a transparent blur to grow out of the darkness and with it the question of where things appear to us in their form. Validity demanding answers to this question slip back into the melancholy of their origin after a short glow. The photographs tell of finding and being looked at a moment that belongs to me. In this lucubratio, too, the fragments, signs and motifs found point to the contingency and mystery of a living whole, according to individual interpretation.
- Bernd Weingart