Kerstin Flake - Turbulenzen & Christian Herzig - Erhöhung

Kerstin Flake's series Fake Spaces might also be described as a 'message from the interior', although, in these new works, the documentary and the pictorial are dialectically opposite. Taken in deserted, late nineteenth century houses, all the photographs possess somewhat flagrant elements that overturn the conventional order of these vacant rooms. Enigmatic moments and bizarre configurations permeate the heedfully staged photographs. Everyday objects such as coat hangers and plastic bags float in the air; tables and chairs move in ways that do not correspond to their intended functions; in attics or stairwells, hats and buckets are in a state of spectral levitation; huge flaps of wallpaper dangle from what looks like a tiled wall, but which is also only of wallpaper; and, shattered from a glass door by a pendant light fitting gone astray, shards of glass hover in the air. Kerstin Flake's disruptions of order are temporary constellations: r´they are positioned in front of the camera by the abandoned houses' final 'habitant'. [...] In Fake Spaces, the Leipzig artist elaborates her inherently paradoxical photographic method. 

from Ebner, Florian. "Turmoil in the Interior." Ed. Flake, Kerstin, and Matthias Kleindienst. Turbulenzen. Leipzig: Lubok Verlag, 2009.