Reflective Projections: Deaccessioned Slide Libraries as Biography

A commissioned 1750-word chapter for an art book, Training Images by Philip Goldbach, covering the German artist's works using deaccessioned slide libraries. The essay considers how biographical frameworks (of the artist; of the makers of the slides) offer new ways of thinking about metapictures and mise en abyme.

Material Memory of Visual History. Images of a Transformation

Philipp Goldbach (b. 1978 in Cologne; works in Solingen) investigates orders of knowledge in the context of a profound shift in media technology. He transforms carrier media that are in the process of disappearing into new aesthetic experiences, making structures, storage processes, and media history itself the subject of his installations, objects, and images. The starting point for his long-term project are 35mm slide collections from universities: entire slide libraries with photographic reproductions of artworks that became obsolete as teaching aids in the discipline of art history through digitization. Goldbach’s sculptural, spatially expansive works based on this analogue film material are snapshots and metaphors of an epochal shift in the production and use of visual representations. Through the obsolete image carriers, they provoke reflection on the new, supposedly disembodied universe that emerged after
the digital turn. The monograph Training Images marks the first comprehensive presentation in print of this body of work, developed since 2013, featuring numerous installation views and reproductions of individual pieces. Writings by Florian Ebner, Thomas Elsen, Ursula Frohne, Stefan Gronert, Lilian Haberer, and Annebella Pollen shed light on various aspects of Goldbach’s work from the perspectives of institutional critique, media history, and the theory of action.