This second exhibition in the series with/against the flow. Contemporary Photographic Interventions presents works by Sebastian Stumpf and by the artists’ duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, two approaches that each see performative interventions as a key part of their work. The artists use photography and video to playfully and sometimes ironically comment on our present urban lives and its visual configuration of urbanity. They address architectural spaces as a formal expression of society. They work with existing urban orders, showing the gaps in the shape of our cities, questioning what we see and take for granted, and alluding to what is easily overlooked. 

A comparison between works by Sebastian Stumpf and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs shows different ways of intervening in the image. While Sebastian Stumpf places his own body in relation to cityscapes and landscapes, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs work with pyrotechnics and wooden constructions that become part of real architecture by means of the optical laws of perspective.

Approaches like these stand for an expanded understanding of photography, film and documentary practice. The artists explore the parameters of their tools, in a subversive and artistic — in the truest sense of the word — manner. They use visual tricks and deception to create suspense and illusion, thereby drawing on the very opposite of documentary evidence. They thus abandon the idea that documentation must refrain from all kinds of staging and enactment. The artists rather use enactment in order to react specifically to the world of images that surrounds us.

The double exhibition is part of an exhibition series on contemporary photographic interventions organised by Institute for International Cultural Relations (ifa). The series focuses on approaches to photography in which the much-discussed flood of images and sensory overload of our time is both the tool and the object of exploration leading to new forms of imagery that investigate and question our society of spectacle. The first exhibition presented works by Viktoria Binschok and Michael Schäfer and began its world tour in 2016.

Curated by Florian Ebner and Christin Müller