Natur Blick

“I think I scan, I think I scan, I think I scan. And I touch, in order to see. Scanning is a visual movement, a sweeping glance, a skim, an analysis, and a conversion. To scan is to look quickly, and also to look carefully. In the digital realm, scanning demands proximity, it is intimate in this way. The seeing eye of the machine is a reader of surfaces, recording traces of a perceptual and tactile encounter. In the land of the flatbed, touch, vision, and memory become inseparable. In this sense, the seeing organ is more akin to a tongue than an eye, a close-up form of perception and ingestion, licking blindly in the dark.” – Chantal Faust 2018

The Koppel Project is pleased to present Natur Blick, curated by Augustine Carr and Paula Zambrano, which brings together the work of ten contemporary artists who investigate the concept of ‘scanning’. The works included vary from photography to installation, video to performance, and sculpture as well as accompanying texts by Chantal Faust and Daniel C. Blight.

The exhibition invites us to engage with the complexities of scanning understood as a creative method, a way of representation, a mode of research, and as an encounter with contemporary art. The various facets of this artistic technique, and route to portraying the world, involve aspects of searching and looking, identifying and detecting, recognising and knowing. Scanning starts with the process of a determined intention, but it unfolds with intuition and perception. In scanning, blindness and awareness occur in synchronicity so that we can appropriate the world we know on our exterior and also grasp content beyond our consciousness.



Natur Blick, which roughly translates to the ‘nature of looking’ is derived from Goethe’s quote, “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” It explores various interpretations of a ‘scan'. Furthermore, it invites us to first consider scanning as a way to absorb what we see around us, and then to dwell on the thoughts and perceptions that capture us, on the ideas and feelings that, inversely, scan us. Natur Blick therefore takes place in both the physical and experiential worlds.

Alongside this exhibition, The Koppel Project Hive will host two performances by the LUNATRAKTORS featuring Carli Jefferson & Clair Le Couteur. With a combination of percussion and vocals, the LUNATRAKTORS explore how the word ‘scan’ can be used to describe the rhythm or structure of verse, by tapping the foot.