[mis]perception and [dis]place[ment]

In her objects, installations and photography Claudia von Funcke aims to undermine spatial and perceptual certitude. She documents, analyses and dissects urban spaces, often unspectacular and derelict ones, reassembling them in unfamiliar ways.

She focuses on the process of the transitory modern city where the subject is forced to inhabit a montage space. The city’s complex structures, layouts and meanings are presented as provisional arrangements, overlapping layers of history in constant permutation.

Building materials such as steel, glass and fibre board, high tech materials, photographs and everyday objects discarded by the city take on abstract
geometric forms which penetrate, distort and fractionalize the space around them. The objects and installations themselves are then further destabilized by the superimposition of light and projections.

Through cropping and the choice of detail and fragment in her photography, she presents the conventional perception of reality as just one option amongst many: perspectives are fragile constructions constantly subject to acceleration, deterioration and reinterpretation.

Funcke’s objects and installations are created within the influence of the diverse fields of perceptual theory, brain research, molecular biology, geophysics and contemporary architecture. Illusion, delusion, infinite mutability – material and immaterial constructs intermingle and become indistinguishable. One is forced into psychological realms where the dynamics of seeing are disrupted and inner safeties are lost.

5 Cities
Architecture and Urbanity in Art

You have to enter the large-scale installations from Claudia von Funcke's (*1966) 5 Cities series, you have to move around in them, you have to adopt different angles and distances, you have to let the soundscape affect you, let the moving projection move over your own body and see it as a shadow on the wall, you have to become part of the moving cityscape in order to withdraw from it again at the end. Here, the city becomes a walk-in installation.

No, these video sculptures cannot be captured in the two-dimensionality and immobility of a photograph, even less so than a video with a still taken from it. This is because photographs form part of the source material for these works by the Berlin photographer, sculptor and installation artist. Photos that she took herself while travelling to the respective cities - Paris, London, Berlin, Novosibirsk, Cairo. She reassembles and rearranges several hundred of them in her videos.

One could describe this as de-construction in a technical, artisanal sense. And yet it is precisely the flatness, smoothness and surface of photography that von Funcke's moving, broken-up large collages resist and counteract. They create a three-dimensional impression for the viewer in that the projections do not encounter a smooth wall, but rather installed corrugated sheet metal parts, panels or corners of the room that are out of plumb and occasionally, depending on the installation location, even supporting columns.

In their dynamism and restlessness, these works are a simulacrum of the contemporary metropolis, be it European, Russian or North African (Cairo). Differences between these cities arise from the colours, architectural forms and details; what they have in common is movement and fragmentation.

But this incessant movement leads to a paradox, one could call it the paradox of the metropolis. In these installations, the city appears as an ongoing process. Von Funcke's art does not show places where transit takes place, rather the places themselves are in constant transit. They therefore appear as non-lieux in the sense of Marc Augé, non-places that do not allow us to find ourselves in their restlessness, no silence, no home.

Claudia von Funcke's series 5 Cities achieves the feat of presenting the city in its movement, dynamics, fragility and fragmentation, placing us in it, as it were, and at the same time making us aware of our own perception: the flooding of our senses with stimuli, our attempt to be able to fix or determine something in what is happening, to make the excess of acoustic signals, the background noise of the city tangible. Event and subjective perception, objectively occurring events and the subject's attempt to assert itself within them - this is where they meet, and the perceiving subject experiences being overpowered.

The experience of the loneliness and anonymity of these cities remains remarkable. We face them. We enter them. We become part of them. But we see no people in them, only facades, walls, occasionally the shadows cast by other visitors. This is also part of the physiognomy of the big city that von Funcke's works make tangible.

Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, 2025, Kunstforum International, volume 301, Zukunftsraum Urbanität, p. 116-117.