With works by Viktoria Binschtok and Michael Schäfer, this exhibition presents two photographers whose work reflects in different ways the world of media images and the ‘digital turn’. While Michael Schäfer analyses images from the news and from entertainment, Viktoria Binschtok takes a look a new channels and functions of communication via images in the internet age. Both photographers thus continue in the tradition of a strong artistic interest in the mass media which began in the 1970s. Fascinated and irritated by the economic power and the rhetorical coercion that these images exert in our society, artists in this tradition usually take a critical view of media images. Every new generation of artists thereby reflects the most recent technological developments and their effects on society. The artists’ working methods range from simple collection and appropriation to analytical collage to staged imitation. 

This constellation of works by Viktoria Binschtok and Michael Schäfer contrasts pictures made by the artists themselves with found media images that have become autonomous. The exhibition is also a reflection on the present and future potential of images. Both artists intervene in found images, processing the images of the media and shifting their inherent structures of reception so as to draw out their latent potential. These interventions make the predefined realities of the media visible. They also show the nascent autonomy of images in a future realm of digital algorithms. This double exhibition is the beginning of a new Institute for International Cultural Relations exhibition series focusing on contemporary photographic interventions. Our series looks at approaches to photography in which the much-discussed flood of images is both the tool and the object of exploration, leading to new forms of imagery that investigate and question our society of spectacle.

Curated by Florian Ebner and Christin Müller