With the works of #3 Sebastian Sumpf and #4 Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, the exhibition introduces two positions in which performative interventions are central to the artistic work. The artists use the medium of photography and video to comment playfully and sometimes ironically on urban life today and its visual configuration. They engage with the way architectural space expresses society as form, highlighting gaps in the structure of the city, interrogating commonplace sights and making the inconspicuous visible.
Comparing the works of Sebastian Stumpf and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs reveals different ways of intervening in the image. While Sebastian Stumpf places his own body in relationship to the urban space and landscape, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs work with pyrotechnics and wooden constructions, using the optical laws of perspective to turn these into integral elements of real architectural structures. Approaches like these stand for a broader understanding of photography, film and documentary practice.
The artists explore the limits of their materials in a way that is both subversive and artistic, by creating suspense and illusion through deception and visual trickery – so actually this is the opposite of documentary evidence. In this way they depart from the idea that such an attitude must not rely on any kind of directorial intervention. Rather, the artists stage-manage things to create a trenchant reaction to the world of images surrounding us.
