FOTOHOF is pleased to have won the internationally renowned photo artist Jennifer Bolande for an exhibition. On display will be the series “Globe Sightings” created in recent years and the photo sculpture “Appliance House” from the 1980s.

Jennifer Bolande developed “Globe Sightings” when she photographed windows in urban spaces for her photo sculptures. She noticed that globes are often placed in the windows of private homes, but also in shops, offices and schools. The resulting photographs often only show a large section of the house, the globes then become tiny objects that the viewer of the pictures has to consciously look for. The photographs always show the gaze of the viewer standing in the public space, who cannot get close enough to the globes to look at them in detail. In this way, Jennifer Bolande also addresses the question between public and private space, which is always at the heart of her work. The globes, in their function as miniature models of the earth, also allude to NASA’s space photographs, in which they are usually shown floating behind glass in a dark room. Here again, the demarcation between model and reality becomes blurred.

With the work “Appliance House”, an approx. 170 cm high light box, Jennifer Bolande again links two levels of meaning. The outer form of the light box corresponds to the Lever Building in Manhattan, a classic of high-rise architecture from the 1950s. Jennifer Bolande photographed individual windows from this skyscraper and mounted them in the corresponding positions of this skyscraper. In doing so, she plays, among other things, with a certain level of meaning of this high-rise building, namely that it was built by the Lever detergent company as its headquarters and thus carries with it the connotation of a clean, progressive, efficient way of life. The other image layer is a photograph of the display of an “appliance shop” (hence the slightly modified name of the artwork). This photo, like the photos of the high-rise building, was taken at night. In a display window on the first floor, the new household helpers glow and promise the willing buyer entry into the “seventh consumer heaven”. Again, the photos are only taken from the street, i.e. from a public place, and as in the “Globe Sightings”, they are hidden from direct access by their positioning and presentation behind glass. Parts of these photos of the “appliance store” are integrated into the light box of the high-rise building. Both levels – that of a small appliance shop in a cheap part of Manhattan and that of the corporate headquarters in the best location merge into symbols of our culture.