Susanne Greinke
Green Screens, Refugee Series.

Markus Döhne looks through archives, books and magazines for photographic image documents, which are both impulse and theme of his work. Sometimes yellowed, worn, sometimes pungently sharp, these images document events that have passed long ago or show current affairs. As photocopies of fateful historical moments they are either an integral part of the collective visual memory, or deliberately erased and stored away until Döhne makes them again accessible.

Though, before these photographs appear in his work again, they have undergone a metamorphosis. As the photographically produced image itself, able to alter the reality depicted on it at the moment of illumination, Markus Döhne acquired the photographic material by converting. He dissociates the image from its functional context and its materiality. The photos are converted into screen prints or screens that have been exposed with photo emulsion that are the precursors of the actual prints. While retaining the information of the images, they have been enlarged and changed in color. Despite increasing blurring one gets the impression that the actual picture information of the starting material has become even more apparent by the process of artistic appropriation. By doing so he poses the question of the semantic potential of images.
 
In the group of works called Green Screens, Refugee Series. Döhne processed historic photos of fugitives from the time of the Spanish Civil War, as well as modern infrared images of people transgressing a border illegally, taken by the border control authorities at the German/Czech border. In his green and yellow works of gauze, Döhne makes one feel the threat to illegal fugitives. They cover the whole scenario of escape and transgression in the moment of an image. As the photographic templates serve as an impulse for the artist themselves, they serve as triggers for a process of making conscious and remembering in the observer. By this Döhne grasps an issue that can hardly be more topical in the face of contemporary migration flows. He recalls the need to be on the way, the vulnerability of these travellers when leaving their home and their culture for economic or political reasons
Translated from German by Gisela Pauli Caldas

[Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind.
— Everywhere is better where we are not.]

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