Suspension

Photography has long played a subordinate role in the visual arts as a mediating medium and only relatively recently found its way into the art world as an autonomous medium with equal rights. The fact that visual artists are now appearing in public with their photographic works and bringing them into the aesthetic discussion as a manifest artistic statement is not least due to the renewed debate on the concept of the subject in recent years.
Political content, autobiography, the examination of the body and identity, the documentation of performative processes or the observation and analysis of reality etc. can be mentioned as issues in this context. The everydayness, availability and presence as well as the absolute assertion of the photographic instrument (as a way of fixing images and memories) also refers to the realm of the everyday cultural. From this point of view, the medium’s inherent quality of quick, immediate, almost notebook and diary-like recording plays an essential role.
With photographic works by 23 international artists of the middle and younger generations, the exhibition “Suspension” illuminates the interface between photography and visual art. What the artists have in common is that they use photography first and foremost as a vehicle for transporting certain ideas and attitudes. However, their objectives in terms of content and theme are quite different. It is precisely this diversity that the exhibition’s dramaturgy attempts to take into account.