in cooperation with CPB Foundation
#1
Viktoria Binschtok #2
Michael Schäfer, curated by
Florian Ebner &
Christin Müller
INAUGURATION on
14.11.2019 at
6.00 pm I
Lalit Kala Akademi
An Exhibition by the Institut für
Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa), Stuttgart, Germany,
www.ifa.de
With works by
Viktoria Binschtok and
Michael Schäfer, this exhibition presents two photographers whose work reflects in different ways the world of media images and the ‘digital turn’. While Michael Schäfer analyses images from the news and from entertainment, Viktoria Binschtok takes a look a new channels and functions of communication via images in the internet age. Both photographers thus continue in the tradition of a strong artistic interest in the mass media which began in the 1970s. Fascinated and irritated by the economic power and the rhetorical coercion that these images exert in our society, artists in this tradition usually take a critical view of media images. Every new generation of artists thereby reflects the most recent technological developments and their effects on society. The artists’ working methods range from simple collection and appropriation to analytical collage to staged imitation.
This constellation of works by
Viktoria Binschtok and
Michael Schäfer contrasts pictures made by the artists themselves with found media images that have become autonomous. The exhibition is also a reflection on the present and future potential of images. Both artists intervene in found images, processing the images of the media and shifting their inherent structures of reception so as to draw out their latent potential. These interventions make the predefined realities of the media visible. They also show the nascent autonomy of images in a future realm of digital algorithms.
This double exhibition is the beginning of a new Institute for International Cultural Relations exhibition series focusing on contemporary photographic interventions. Our series looks at approaches to photography in which the much-discussed flood of images is both the tool and the object of exploration, leading to new forms of imagery that investigate and question our society of spectacle.
Viktoria Binschtok reflects on the medium of photography in her photographic work and uses subtle shifts of context to address the function and representation of images. She makes equal use of both her own photographs and images from the internet and other media sources.
Binschtok’s works have been presented in numerous exhibitions in Germanyand abroad, including at C / O Berlin, Kunstverein Göttingen, Centre PompidouMetz, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau Dresden, Arts Santa Monica Barcelona,Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. In 2013 her artist’s book World of Details was published and was nominated for the aperture foundation First Photobook Award. Binschtok was born in 1972 in Moscow. She grew up in West Germany, and studied photography and free arts at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. Viktoria Binschtok lives and works in Berlin.
Michael Schäfer’s approach to photography is a form of artistic mimicry, a way of appropriating images so as to deconstruct them. The artist’s gaze fixes on the over-determination of press images, their surplus of meaning and significance that literally presents the viewer with a historical and political constellation as a finished and closed interpretation.
Schäfer’s works have been shown in solo exhibitions, including at Kunstverein Konstanz, Zephyr in Mannheim, and Kunstverein Leipzig. He has also exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, C / O Berlin, Fotohof Salzburg and Centre de la Photographie Geneva. In 2011 his artist’s book Models was published in the Fotohof edition.
Michael Schäfer was born in 1964 in Sigmaringen and lives and works in Berlin. He studied photography design at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. Schäfer was an on the artistic staff in Leipzig and today teaches at Hartford Art School, Connecticut, and the Berlin University of the Arts.
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