Horst Ademeit
collection of works

Artist
Horst Ademeit

Title
Collection of works from various work complexes

Technology and dimensions
10 daily photos / series from 1991; 20 daily photos / series from 1997; 20 daily photos / series from 2003; 25 observation photos; 1 digital chip with 489 digital photos (series from 2006 with 54 labeled daily cards); 1 Leporello from 2000; 1 object with beads to ward off cold rays

Year of acquisition
2013

Horst Ademeit dedicated over 20 years of his life to photographically documenting cold rays and other invisible rays that harm him and his environment. In the complex reference systems that Ademeit has developed, certain motifs play a constant role: electricity meters, door peeps, construction sites, electrical cables, accumulations of bulky waste or bicycles.

From October 1990, the flood of images that Horst Ademeit produced was cast into a concrete form: he arranged measuring devices and a compass on a daily newspaper and photographed the arrangement with a Polaroid camera. It is the first of 6,006 numbered Polaroids that will be created over the next 14 years. Then he switches to the digital camera. As in a laboratory experiment, Ademeit set up various measuring devices next to the daily newspaper, food or drinks in these daily photos.

Over the years, these arrangements become increasingly complex, as do handwritten notes in microscript that proliferate across the edge of the picture and also occupy the back, recording smells, sounds, messages and personal observations. At the same time, he explores his surroundings and documents his apartment, the basement, the yard and the Düsseldorf district of Flingern with the Polaroid camera. A gigantic archive of individual research.

Born in Cologne in 1937, Horst Ademeit studied textile design after training as a house painter and then at the Cologne Werkkunstschule. In 1970 he briefly enrolled under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The first documentary photos were taken during renovation work in dilapidated houses. Since the late 1980s he has focused on documenting cold rays. In 2008 this work was discovered and exhibited for the first time. He dies in July 2010. The Hamburger Bahnhof dedicated the first museum exhibition to Horst Ademeit in 2011.