In a series of black-and-white photomontages titled The Dizziness of Freedom, Kornelia Hoffmann has created a collection of dizzying perspectives causing a reeling effect while looking at them. Details of modernist architecture place the subject of these works within an urban space. Within the flat surface of Hoffmann’s collages, these photographic fragments, shot by the artist, form a new space. Hoffmann brings her methodology into the foreground by applying tape to the surface, lending stability not only to the fragments in their physical form, but also to the space projected by the image.
“He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down,” stated Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Anxiety). The dizziness of freedom is rooted in the choice of the individual to act within the constraints of his/her reality – a freedom which makes us reel.