EIKON - International Magazine for Photography and Media Art

Penetrating the Eye of the Typhoon: Non Public Spaces - An essay by Tania Hölzl

Ernst Logar is concerned with what is individually and collectively excluded.
In his current series, he photographs spaces that are not accessible to the public.
He captures bureaucratic processes of permission and thus tests the great promise
of publicity and participation.

EIKON #75

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Non Public Spaces

deals with spaces which are not ordinarily open to ordinary citizens.
These chosen places have a special political, economic or social significance.
At first, these spaces seem irrelevant to our lives, but on closer inspection we become
more conscious of their connection to our everyday life. They are an integral part of people's lives
and the state's power to regulate them.

The mapping of these places ranges from mortuaries of forensic medicine, archives
which constitute state identity, central computer rooms where population related data are
registered and processed, police arsenals securing the execution of state power,
strong rooms which store state assets, art depots signifying cultural representation,
scientific laboratories establishing and controlling elementary pysical values, to news studios
constituting interfaces to the public, and other significant places in state and global contexts.

'Non Public Spaces' is about the confrontation of the individual with the apparatus of power
and its institutions, the individual´s continual effort to penetrate these spaces.
Through diverse strategies and elaborate bureaucratic authorisation procedures an attempt
is made to reach these places, to visually retain them and document the process of entering,
using different media. These are spaces which constitute interfaces to the public while being
physically exclusive due to their concentration of power.

Conference room - Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Vatican, Ernst Logar 2008