with

Christiane Feser

Andreas Mühe

Annegret Soltau

Anaïs Tondeur

Christiane Feser (*1977) is known for her ongoing series of photo-objects: three-dimensional, photographic sculptures that behave like representational and optical experiments; simultaneously exploring the perceptions of a camera and a person. By transforming the flat print back into a dimensional object with its own sense of time and space, she shatters the basic tenet that a photograph reproduces a scene existing elsewhere. At times pins are meticulously placed or thread is woven into the composition, resulting in re-sculpted dizzying networks of geometric landscapes and panoramas. What is important here for Feser is the “emphasis of the lines” and the process of not only recording the moment and the object but instead engaging in an act of “tracing” her structures and essentially reality and life as we see and experience it.

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Andreas Mühe (*1979)  is one of the best-known artists in Germany. He became internationally known through his exploration of German history and identity. In his photographs he deals with sociological, historical and political themes, which he stages in special environments with elaborate lighting contrasts.

As monumental forms made of concrete, bunkers crisscross Europe’s landscape. The dark past is firmly inscribed in the bunkers. But their archaic form, far removed from ideological tastes and planned purely for utility and efficiency, removes them from any temporal and spatial classification. What is past here can be future somewhere else, and vice versa. In all its monumentality, weight and hardness, the bunker paradoxically represents the flow of history and meaning. The only constant is the gap between the function of attack and protection. While on the French coast the bunkers are now a popular meeting place for young people and a playground for children, elsewhere in the world new bunkers are being built for war.

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ANNEGRET SOLTAU (*1946, Lüneburg, Germany) is a pioneer in the field of feminist art and Body Art. For over 40 years, she has occupied herself with her physical and mental identity. In doing so, she utilizes her environment, her family and children over and over in her work. The thread that she uses in her performances and self-portraits encompasses faces and bodies like a safe cocoon; hidden and distorted, but also flexible.

During her two pregnancies, German artist and performer Annegret Soltau documented how her body changed with video and photography. By scratching, cutting, collaging, and stitching, the artist altered and reconfigured the negatives. The work is an expression of a fragmented identity and also juxtaposes the roles of woman, artist, and mother. Auf dem Gebärtisch [On the birthing table] is a photographic triptych that portrays the naked body of the pregnant artist. Sitting on a delivery table, the figure gradually emerges from a white sheet that is draped around it like a shroud. This photomontage raises questions about medically assisted reproduction, and the physical body is both the medium and subject of this intervention.

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Anchored in ecology thought. Anaïs Tondeur searches for a new form of political art. Crossing natural sciences and anthropology, myth making and new media processes, she creates speculative narratives and engages on investigations through which she experiments other conditions of being to the world. Working with photographies, installations, or videos she seeks a new aesthetic, in the sense of a renewal of our modes of perception, and explores beyond the separation between nature and culture, other modes of relationships with humans and other than humans.

At the foreground of her practice are elusive elements of the climate (but also of us), namely radioactive traces, soot particles, waning plants, a prehistoric whiff, human tears—all pointing to the intricate inextricability between our bodies and the world. And all encountered in sites of late industrialism—decaying infrastructures such as former photographic factory sites, nuclear exclusion zones, polluted skies, and planetary spaces where ruins are not inert, but alive with residues unexpectedly full of potential. It is through such places that Tondeur’s work breeds novel engagements, pointing to alternative forms of (toxic) relationalities and photographic materialities.