fotokonkret

With works by Kirsten Heuschen • Yala Juchmann • Viram Lyonn • Jens Waldenmaier

Opening: Friday, April 5, 2013, 7:30 PM Exhibition duration: April 6 to May 5, 2013
Finissage with artist talk: Sunday, May 5, 2013, 7:30 PM

What can concrete photography be?

The Kunstverein Neukölln embarks on a quest for answers with the exhibition fotokonkret at kunstraum t27. The exhibition features photographic works by four artists, each exploring various facets of the phenomenon through their diverse underlying concepts, materials, photographic techniques, and presentation styles. The participating artists address the essence of photography itself, focusing on the media conditions: light, light-sensitive materials, photochemical processes, and the apparatus. In their own unique ways, they probe the specific possibilities of the medium, sometimes consciously incorporating chance as a creative element in the image-making process.

Their photographic explorations yield images whose connection to external reality remains ambiguous or that oscillate between rudimentary objecthood and pure form and color abstraction. Some of these works develop an aesthetic that aligns them with certain stylistic principles of painting, while others possess a distinctly graphic character.

Kirsten Heuschen presents photography in its raw form through two works. One is a large-format photogram that, unlike traditional photography, is created without a camera. She uses a transparent material that, through irregular overlays, generates a strong sense of depth. The other work is an installation on the wall, where she employs an old photographic fine printing technique using typical cyan-blue tones and a rich gradient of colors: cyanotype. The individual cyanotypes resemble stars or planets, an impression that is enhanced by their presentation.

Yala Juchmann utilizes the earth as a camera body in her serial work elysian fields, allowing light to find its way to light-sensitive material. This experimental approach results in highly painterly abstract compositions that evoke echoes of long-gone archaeological artifacts. In her series/work fragments, she uses photograms of paper and film arrangements as motifs, consciously disrupting the rectangular format typical of classical photography.

Viram Lyonn addresses the theme of reproducibility in photography through his works. In his colored photographs, existing image motifs are photographed and increasingly distorted through repeated copying of each new photo until the original subject dissolves into a pure play of color fields. In a large-format black-and-white piece, he also employs a photographic replica, which is enlarged to the point where the original narrative structure disintegrates in favor of pixel resolution. The resulting image is then divided into several individual images, which are reassembled like modules into a new whole.

Jens Waldenmaier explores space with his camera over a specific period, capturing its changes in a single image. By repeatedly opening the shutter and moving the camera, he intuitively follows the rhythm and sound of the space. However, in the resulting images, the space is no longer recognizable but reduced to form, color, and/or line. The new patterns and structures embody the time factor of the process, merging past and present into an assemblage of snapshots.

Curated by Rebekka Hofmann, Karl Menzen, Norbert Steigerwald