The FOTOHOF shows the first solo exhibition outside Japan of the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and his first exhibition with a retrospective character. Araki’s work is conveyed on several levels, and the institutions of contemporary (photo) art represent only one of them. This multi-layered and seemingly playful approach to the media of publication is repeated in the artist’s numerous publications: here too, categories, genres and context changed at will. Making this somewhat insidious game – which has earned Araki the fame of a pop star in Japan – transparent to the “distant observer” is all the more difficult because the photographer himself seems to reject any method of approach: his photographs are hardly ever dated, They appear repeatedly in different contexts and thus form less a continuous story than an increasingly dense collection of images.

Exhibition conception: Seiichi Furuya, Manfred Willmann