PHOTOART LALAMOEBIUS | »PHOTOART VOLUME II«

PHOTOART LALAMOEBIUS presents: PHOTOART VOLUME II.

In the second installment of the PHOTOART exhibition series, works of four new talents in contemporary photography will be shown: Dennis Busch, Micha Otto, Fiona Struengmann and Diane Vincent. The exhibition series started in January 2016 and will now be resumed during the European Month of Photography in Berlin.

The four presented positions differ in subject and technique, yet they all share the same objective: to create new realities by merging the present with the past.

The photo theorist Roland Barthes describes in his prominent essay „Camera Lucida“ (1980) how the aspects of time characterise photography, especially the relation between the present and the past. While the chosen subject exists in the moment the picture is taken, i.e. the present, it also immediately becomes an object of the past, when it is bound onto the film.

This simultaneity marks the four photographic approaches of this exhibition. The viewer experiences this synchrony via the artists’ technical and aesthetic means of expression. Photo collages of temporarily engaging floating worlds, snap-shots using the pinhole camera technique, photograms of modern architecture as well as high-definition digital photographs of forgotten primeval worlds shape the exhibition’s diverse range of works.

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In his collages Dennis Busch (1971 in Amstelveen, NL) creates his own world, „in which the past, the present and the future merge and exist in parallel“. For his collage-realities he draws inspiration from all around, including advertisement, art, nature and media. He disregards artistic styles or demarcations like „High Art“ and „Low Art“. His pictures turn away from ideals and frame conditions. Instead, they mirror the shallowness and diversity of the reality we live in and they have another message: not to take anything – and especially not art – too seriously.

Fiona Struengmann (1986 in Tegernsee) returns to the technical origins of photography in her latest series Needleview. She works with a self-made pinhole camera. Fiona finds her subjects traveling the world. Her photographs are inventories and poetic impressions of her surroundings. By using this type of camera, Fiona turns short moments into timeless, nostalgic and meditative pictures. She creates blurry spaces in which you can get lost for a brief moment to escape the ever more spinning, loud and colourful reality.

The idea around fugacity characterises the WBS 70 series by Micha Otto (1980 in Berlin). While travelling through Japan he started to think about the lifespan of sunlight. Is it possible to revive the past light of the sun with its transitory traces? As a native East Berliner growing up in a “Plattenbau” aka “WBS70” (a type of dwelling that was built in the German Democratic Republic using slabs), the artist uses a self-constructed small size architectural model for this series. He places the model on light-sensitive paper and meticulously simulates the progression of the sunbeams at certain times of the day with artificial light. Through this process Micha creates unique photograms that visualise the course of the sun at the place of his own past.

i join the crystal-eyed turtle’s hand by Diane Vincent (1976 in Leipzig) reveals the dimension beyond time. One day the artist just wrote down these eponymous words. Inspired by their sound she created vividly coloured photographs of a tropical nature, overlapping layers, effigies of phantasmic, bright sensory impressions. The poetic title evokes the image of a turtle with kaleidoscope-like eyes. One can even imagine the sound of the rainforest in the very moment the photograph was taken. The perspectives are unusual. Diane invites the viewer to see the world with different eyes.

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