In his video works, photographs and sculptures, Niklas Goldbach questions the relation between hierarchic societal structures and individual, liberal courses of action. Goldbach's protagonists – dressed in the garment of the urban prototype in white shirts and black trousers and referred to as "representatives" or "placeholders" by the artist – colonize seemingly epic stages of modern architectural complexes, postmodern urban environments or alleged paradises defying civilization, all finding their commonality as places oscillating between utopia, dystopia and heterotopia, while lacking any clearance for an escape. While in numerous of Goldbach's video works the protagonists seem to be solely trapped in structures of control and discipline, the exhibited photographs from the series Means of Escape (2012) point already within their title to a state of attempted escape from these conditions: in the dramatically stylized images of an ocean, a forest, a fenced field, train tracks and an aerodrome only the scattered costumes of the representatives attest to agitated previous incidents.

Exhibition Text House Of Cards, Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai. Curated by Viktor Neumann

This Goldbach work deals with the identity, the difference and the standardization of human relationships. In his works, the artist puts his protagonists in even newer experiences: seemingly identical in their appearance and in their outfits, his characters in reality are distinguished by a deep behavioral gap. With the series of large format pictures Means of Escape (2012), Goldbach expresses the will to exit from the limitations caused by the uniformity that appears in his works and, in general, in society. The clothes of his protagonists – a white shirt and black pants – are dispersed in the most disparate environments, revealing an escape towards the deep unknown.

Exhibition text by Elena Forin, Serata Videoinsight, Centro VIDEOINSIGHT®, Turin, Italy