Stefka Ammon investigates cultural projections and media myths in word and image. The subject of her piece Oriental Black is our image of Islam, which, with a history spanning centuries, manifests itself in art, politics and the media. The central part of her work, a black marble slab treated with rose oil, becomes a multilayered metaphor providing for olfactory perception as well as visual and haptic. Beyond religious disputes over images, the minimalistic wall piece spurs reflection on the limits of representation: How can a rejection of imagery give rise to projections of the other, the mystical, the unnameable? The fact that the artist chose a type of marble called "Oriental Black" is, in view of this, certainly anything but a coincidence.
Carla Orthen, 2008 (translation by Patrick Hubenthal)
