A bent arm, needle in hand, thread stretched tautly forming a diagonal but what is being sewn can not be seen; the projection of the naked back of a woman on the white wall of a darkened room and the corresponding apparatus; Christ as a figure of agony and the spread-open tighs of a woman; a gray, white and reddish shimmering surface with streaks of sewn seams. The photograph of a working process; an exhibition situation; two juxtaposed images; a piece of work handmade by the artist. The subject matter of Maria Hahnenkamp’s work is photography: as material. Handwork assails the photographs in their concrete materiality and punctures, stitches up, and sands down the paper. Embroidered in white thread, ornaments from a book of patterns for church decorations spread across photographs of lengths of red cloth under which the contours of body parts reveal themselves; everything else representational is rubbed out. This processing, this alienating and distancing insistently obstruct the illusionism of photography, which can first reappear in this publication, allowing us to yet imagine objects – not photographs. (Friedrich Tietjen)

Maria Hahnenkamp, * 1959 in Eisenstadt, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna.