SITE #3 BLACK BOX

At Galerie Christian Lethert, the exhibition series SITE – photographic works by Ann Christine Freuwörth presents in its third edition under the title black box a group exhibition with five photographic positions. The artists Hanna Becker, Marc Botschen, Cihan Cakmak, Franziska Kaufhold and Jan Ladwig deal with inner states and the construct of identity in different ways through their photographic observations. The partly fragmentary search and formation processes of social, cultural and family profiles question photography as a medium and its modes of action within the concept of reality on a further level.

With the multidisciplinary project »The Game« Hanna Becker (b. 1986, Berlin) points to the world as a stage of human existence. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of visual languages to address the absurdities, ambitions, and fantasies of the human condition. By assembling different pictorial contexts, languages and materials in space, dynamic fields of tension are opened up between an inner psychological level and a social outside.
Based on an ancestral passport from his family’s archive, artist Marc Botschen’s (b. 1991, Hamburg) work »Piece of Cake« conceptually brings together self-portraits, everyday intimacies, and philosophical text fragments like ingredients in a cake batter. The intertwining of content and formal narratives are explored both in his book and in space, provoking a radical dialectic of not knowing. Identity here represents a continuous process of identifications: ceaselessly dependent on images and filtered through the cultural production of meaning.
In her works »em fraktal« and »when we leave« Cihan Cakmak (b. 1993, Leipzig) approaches and distances herself equally from her familial and cultural past. Dreams, physicality and encounters are interwoven within intimate self and group stagings, sound and video into a web that tells of an often repressed and marginalized identity, but also of emancipation.
The installation »Untiefe« by Franziska Kaufhold (b. 1995, Berlin) delicately deals with the concept of the ›Island‹. The geographical location is here the base and symbol of an inner emotional state. The sensual spatial installation – a collage of photographs, videos and audio recordings takes up the entire space and allows the viewer to literally dive into the author’s world of memories and thoughts.
Jan Ladwig (b. 1987, Essen) uses a chance attic find as the trigger and basis for the project »Abbildung Ähnlich«. The result is a photographic narrative about the unknown ›Stefan Klein‹. The fictional story is composed of the rearrangement of existing facts as well as parts invented by the author. In a documentary manner, the accuracy and binding nature of photographic images is questioned.
The works on display refer to blanks in terms of form and content, consciously working with blackenings and confront moments of unknowing.