with/against the flow

Contemporary Photographic Interventions

New technical developments, floods of images and blurring boundaries between reality and fiction: the exhibition series “with / against the flow. Contemporary Photographic Interventions” selected photographic positions of artists living in Germany in which new forms of visual reality are used to question our society of the spectacle. The frequently invoked flood of images in these works is both a tool and an object of investigation. Intervention in the photographic material or in the external reality thereby links the diverse positions.

#3 Sebastian Stumpf und #4 Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs

Sebastian Stumpf and the artists’ duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs represent two approaches that each see performative interventions as a key part of their work. With photographs and videos they comment playfully and sometimes ironically on our present urban lives and its visual configuration of urbanity. The artists address architectural spaces as a formal expression of society. They work with existing urban orders, showing the gaps in the shape of our cities, questioning what we see and take for granted, and alluding to what is easily overlooked.

At the presentation in Guangzhou, the exhibition includes three artistic positions from China, selected in conjunction with Chinese curators. Chen Wei imagines  in his photographs new urban architectures, Li Lang’s work observes the social realities of urban and rural China as seen through the window of a train while multimedia artist Cao Fei shows a dystopian version of life in a metropolis.

Opening with the artists, curator Christin Müller and the head of ifa's Arts Department, Dr. Ellen Strittmatter.