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.
The first exhibition in the exhibition series “with/against the flow” shows works by the artist Viktoria Binschtok and the artist Michael Schäfer. Their works reflect the visual worlds of the media and the "Digital Turn". While Schäfer analyses news and entertainment images, Binschtok explores the new channels and ways in which images function in the digital age. By these means, they continue the increased interest in the mass media taken by the arts since the 1970s.
The constellation of the works by Viktoria Binschtok and Michael Schäfer traces an arc between self-made and independent visual forms, between present and future potentials of our visual world. Binschtok and Schäfer process media images further and shift the deliberate structures of reception. In this way, they work out the latent potential of the images. These interventions render the ready-made reality of the media visible and the looming autonomy of images emerges in a future reign of digital algorithms.
Viktoria Binschtok and Michael Schäfer are going to hold a workshop on site.
Curators:
Florian Ebner has been head of the Photography Department of the Centre Pompidou in Paris since 2017.
Christin Müller is a freelance curator and author from Leipzig.
With over 20 touring exhibitions currently travelling across the globe and with its diverse event programmes on contemporary art, the ifa links the German art scene with internationally active cultural creators and forms cooperations and networks. The projects, many of which were developed in co-creation with local partners, cover the various disciplines of modern and contemporary fine arts – from current themes in architecture, photography and design to Bauhaus and monographic exhibitions such as Rosemarie Trockel or Marcel Odenbach. These projects generate local meeting platforms and allow international perspectives on topics of global relevance. The ifa also provides loan exhibits to interested museums.
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