As a foundation for media art, the IMAI—Inter Media Art Institute is presenting the exhibition Projected Data Images: Testcuts (2010) by Katharina Sieverding. Sie Like few other artists located in Düsseldorf, she incorporates the thrilling transfer of media by means of various production formats. For four decades now, this internationally renowned and often-decorated artist has been part of the avant-garde of this city.

For Quadriennale 2010, imai invited the artist Katharina Sieverding to realize her concept of Projected Data Images: Testcuts im NRW-Forum. Katharina Sieverding is famous for self-portraits, large photographs, and photographic installations that engage with the context of origin, production, code and suggestive effect of media images.

For the installation Projected Data Images: Testcuts, which is the focus of the exhibition, the artist examined comprehensively for the first time her immense photo archive of more than forty years. The basis of this revision was, however, not negatives but so-called test strips (testcuts), which are actually fragmentary by-products of the process of analog enlargement. Arranged into digital montages, these once random details of images from more than 1,800 photographs provide historical references that bring to live an individual, ahistorical mnemonic construction of people, exhibitions, and events in the art world of Düsseldorf and the world since 1966.

Several wall-sized projections are combined to form a continuous frieze of images. This portfolio of constantly changing photographic motifs is played back at temporal intervals, so that it approximates a cinematographic process. Fluctuating constellations of images design a visual system of intersections, connecting lines, referential levels, and spaces for reflection of subject matter and motifs.