with/against the flow. Contemporary Photographic Interventions. #3 Sebastian Stumpf #4 Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs

Contrasting the works of Sebastian Stumpf with those of Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs reveals their different ways of manipulating images. Whereas Sebastian Stumpf places his own body in a relationship to urban spaces and landscapes, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs work with pyrotechnics and wooden constructions that become elements of the real architecture due to the laws of optics and perspective.

Both approaches indicate an expanded understanding of photography, film, and documentary practice. The artists test the tools of their trade by taking them to their very limits in ways that are both subversive and artistic: they use visual tricks and deceptions to create suspense and illusion—the very opposite, actually, of documentary strategies. In so doing, the artists abandon the idea that such a stance precludes any kind of staged intervention. Rather, the artists utilize stagings to make a pointed response to the world of images that surrounds us.

This dual exhibition is part of a series that focuses on photographic interventions organized by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen — Institute for International Cultural Relations). For this series artists were selected in whose works the often invoked deluge of images and information overload is both a tool and the object of investigation and in which new forms of visual reality are utilized to interrogate our society of the spectacle. The first exhibition in the series presented works by Viktoria Binschtok and Michael Schäfer and has been touring the world since 2016.

Imagine you are a photographer needing to go out into the world to take new pictures. But what does “out” actually mean these days? And how can we tell what “new” pictures are? What value does photography have as an artistic medium in an era in which everything has already been photographed and the world is awash with an incessant stream of networked images? What are the issues that need to be addressed today? And how?

The exhibition series with/against the flow. Contemporary Photographic Interventions presents artists who live in Germany, have established their own distinct visual idioms, and are now interrogating the medium of photography afresh. It is the forms that their artistic interventions take that connect their various positions. Regardless of what motivates the artists or what interests them in terms of content, in the work they do they intervene in the very substance of the image or in external reality
itself. The question remains as to whether this work should still be labelled “documentary” or is, in fact, a form of realism that spills over into fiction.

After prior consultation with ifa, the organizers will be pleased to include works of local artists in the exhibitions of this series.