MAIN SECTOR

BOOTH E33

with

THORSTEN BRINKMANN

CHRISTIANE FESER

IWAJLA KLINKE

Thorsten Brinkmann

The Hamburg based artist Thorsten Brinkmann (*1971) takes staged photographs of himself. He uses discarded objects like vases, bowls and cans to disguise his head and slips into costumes in order to create various characters. Even though these works are self-portraits he always stays anonymous. He creates imaginary worlds with ‚other man’s trash’.

With these debris of modern culture, he moves humorously and playfully between the genres of photography, sculpture, performance and installation. Photographic self-staging, in which he acts as actor, prop master, director and photographer, is one of his main focuses. Wrapped in second-hand clothes and everyday objects, he transforms himself into anonymous, sometimes grotesque, androgynous figures that playfully reference and counter the compositions of old masters.

Oftentimes he makes assemblages with these photographs, adding found objects to the image and therefore creating three-dimensional pieces. The works sometimes reminds the viewer of popular works of art history showing equestrian statues or monarchs.

Christane Feser

In the truest sense of the word, Christiane Feser (*1977) has identified new facets to the question of what we actually see in a photograph. Her new series arose from an exploration of negative colour space, an element that was commonplace in analogue photography but has largely disappeared in digital practice. Negative images require a rethinking: colours are inverted, light becomes shadow, space seems to dissolve. It is precisely this additional layer of abstraction that interests Feser, because photography itself is always a medium of inversions: it translates space into surface, movement into stillness, world into image. For *Markierungen*, Feser photographed a crumpled sheet of paper in inverted colours, turning light into dark and reversing its texture. Sprayed paint, like yellow that appears blue, heightens this disorientation and adds a painterly touch. She then stitches along the folds with threads that cast shadows—also inverted in the photo. After printing, Feser reconstructs the setup so that the needles pierce the same points, merging image and object into a single, interdependent form.

Iwajla Klinke

Iwajla Klinke (*1976) explores moments of transformation, transition, and concealment through her large-scale portrait photography. Her images often depict men in elaborate, traditional garments, posed against deep black backgrounds that suspend them outside of time and place. Between reality and myth, her subjects seem to hover in a state of becoming – between identity and disguise. Klinke’s photography emerges from extensive research and long journeys to regions, where she encounters her subjects in the midst of local customs and seasonal celebrations. Her portraits examine masculinity as something both constructed and fragile, revealing tenderness beneath layers of representation. The ornate clothing and composed gestures lend her male sitters a sense of dignity, yet their vulnerability surfaces through stillness and introspection. Klinke’s work exposes masculinity not as an emblem of power but as a fleeting, human condition—marked by beauty, uncertainty, and the awareness of its own transience.

Through precise staging and a subtle use of light, Klinke transforms observation into timeless allegory. Her photographs reflect on the fragility of human existence and the enduring desire to find meaning in the ways we appear, conceal, and transform ourselves.

DIGITAL SECTOR

BOOTH F08

with

DANIEL CANOGAR

JOHANNA REICH

Daniel Canogar

Johanna Reich

The project Resurface I-III devotes itself to female artists of the 19th and 20th century who, although successful in their own lifetimes, are not present in the global memory today.

Resurface I lets re-emerge the portraits of forgotten women artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on Linda Nochlin’s famous essay „Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists“ (1971), the project examines whether there really have been no excellent international women artists – except for famous positions such as Frida Kahlo or Käthe Kollwitz. Women of that time, if they wanted to pursue an artistic career, were exposed to extremely difficult conditions. In the course of Johanna Reich’s research in various museums, collections and archives, a collection of 400 female artists of the 19th and 20th centuries was created.

The artists located in various archives are gradually appearing on the Internet due to progressive digitization, or Johanna Reich’s team has put them online on Wikipedia or expanded already existing articles. They thus infiltrate the image of 19th and 20th century art history shaped by male artists and pose the question of how historiography has changed in the post-digital age: while it used to be fixed by books, it is now generated by the Internet, which on the one hand can harbor the danger of a filter bubble, and on the other hand makes a great democratization possible – and calls the familiar into question.

In order to make the brief moment of “resurfacing” visible, Johanna Reich makes polaroid portraits of the female artists and films the picture development process with a digital camera.

„Resurface II“ is dedicated to the more successful of the underrated women artists, so to speak, whose oeuvres are museumized and recognized but still not adequately represented. They have not “completely disappeared”, in many cases you can even find a larger website of these artists or individual works in well-known museums. They seem to be aware but in a kind of translucent presence.

For this part of the project, Johanna Reich has developed her own technique, which she calls SCAN_LIGHTINGS: she takes the portraits of selected women artists via Polaroid and scans them in the moment of development. During the photo development process, this captures nuances of color that can only be seen during the development process. These images, created in a special moment within the cycle between digital and analog, are presented in large format in the exhibition. The blurriness created by the scanning process makes them appear like paintings.