Travel/On Hold, Retelling the Past

Franz Ackermann is a German artist who has worked in a diversity of media and s his work on cities around the world. To the artist, travel is the source of inspiration. He reflects on scenes transformed by globalization and the homogenization of culture, traveling to many cities and continents including Hong Kong, Asia, South America, and Australia.

Travel/On Hold, Retelling the Past has us consider what influence the suspension of physical ment caused by COVID 19 and digitalization after the pandemic had on travel.

The six canvases spread out in the gallery and the images projected onto them make the viewer interact with his work in a complex manner in the space. The fluorescent colors (blue, red, purple, etc.) used to render geometric lines and figures on the canvas are all made of pigments the artist brought from his travels. And, the six videos projected onto them consist of individual archives he collected over 30 years. The video in this work displays Hong Kong’s splendidly lit concrete buildings, people’s everyday lives, streets in the city, and lets the viewers hear daily noises like taxi honks in Thailand. We are allowed to have both visual and auditory experiences at the same time. Ackermann’s work demonstrates lively energy and addresses the problems pertaining to travel brought on by globalization and tourism through an overlap of fragmentary images of high chroma, geometric shapes, and urban images.