Engagement with urban space and sensitisation to the mechanisms at work in it is a core theme of the artist duo Haubitz + Zoche. Architectural structures of urban space are also the focus of their series  Facelift, begun in 2006, which is presented in this publication with a selection of approx. 50 works and accompanied by a literary contribution by Andreas Neumeister. The artists’photographic attention – that of an “observant flaneur”- focuses on the appearance of scaffolding tarpaulins with simulations of actual facades printed on them. Inasmuch as most of the images exactly depict the building behind them, or serve as announcements or advertising for a planned construction project, what arises on the one hand are redundant duplications of architectures, and on the other backdrops that appear almost real in spite of certain deviations in dimension and perspective in photographic depiction. If a few of these simulated architectures succeed in blurring the distinction between image and real architecture in their real encounter in urban space to begin with, the illusionistic effect in Sabine Haubitz’ and Stefanie Zoche’s photos is heightened all the more. Photographing a photograph erases clues that could reveal the building’s masquerade.

Facelift is an art project that clearly gives expression to the ambivalence inherent in the medium of photography, an imaging technique that both creates scenarios and therefore illusions, and serves as a realistic, documentary method at the same time.  Here, the fundamental choice of motif and the special photo detail point up an analytically artistic posture that reflects the theme of staging onto a meta-level. The artificial construction of a deceptive appearance of real architecture in urban space is not presented in order to unmask, i.e. to deconstruct it, but to show it in terms of its own – definitely depictive – reality and to constitute it pictorially. Thus, the photos of the Facelift series are less commentary than imagistic information about the realness of diverse realities – in the photographic image, in the urban situation and on the printed tarpaulin. In the field of models and scenarios that artists have been dealing with often and intensively in recent times, Haubitz + Zoche position themselves above all in terms of a unique specificity in that they do not have their photographic models appear as a parallel or counter-reality. Instead, their photos are direct visual revelations of real processes of transformation underway in our immediate environment. Facelift shows with razor-like clarity and outstanding visual skill how profoundly our perception is determined by constructions, imaginings and simulations.

Sabine Haubitz, *1959 in Nördlingen, Germany, †2014 at Piz Kesch, Switzerland.

Stefanie Zoche, *1965, in Munich, Germany. Lives and works in Munich, Germany München. Artistic collaboration from 1998 to 2014.