Exhibition
B.ODE

A conceptual view onto the museumspace
Photography by Andrea Wilmsen

Tue, 09/21/2021 -
Sat, 01/08/2022
Goethe-Institut Chicago

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• Masks covering the mouth and nose are required at all times
• Reduced capacity with timed entry. Please reserve your time slot info-chicago@goethe.de 
Starting Januarz 1, 2022, we request proof of a booster vaccination if your most recent vaccination is more than six months old.

Andrea Wilmsen’s photographs do not always reveal what kind of room we are looking at—or, for that matter, if it is a room at all. The Berlin-based photographer challenges viewers with her images of absolutely intimate yet very public spaces in museums. She frequently focuses on details or approaches empty walls so closely that we are sometimes led to believe that we are looking at an abstract or nonfigurative photograph. For her current project she photographed the exhibition rooms of the Bode-Museum on the Museum Island in Berlin from constantly new perspectives, although her goal was not to reproduce art. On the contrary, as an experiment in exploring our basic perception of spaces, she focuses on the immediate surroundings of sculptures and paintings, whose edges sometimes extend into the images. She is not interested in the Bode-Museum as a tangible, representative space or the important artworks that are exhibited there, but rather the museum space in general, as a stage for certain objects that by being presented and contextualized there become museum pieces. In this way, she transforms the background with its often-missed details and vistas into surprising, virtually “empty” motifs.

Andrea Wilmsen is a German photographer, currently living in Berlin and Chicago. She studied communication and social science and photography at Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin. Andrea is a member of VG-Bildkunst, Bonn, Germany. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, e.g., at European Month of Photography, Le Festival Voies Off des Recontres d´Arles, Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, Villa Aurora, and was featured in art and architecture magazines.