WYRD – *Not really now anymore*
The Case – Project Space for Photography
Academy of Media Arts, Cologne
June 1st through 4, 2023
In the engagement with the strange, the question of the body of the normal imposes itself. What is the dangerous and disillusioning that bursts in from the outside without the concept of normality: mere fantasy cut off from the real? But perhaps the deceptive feeling lies precisely in profane everyday life, the illusion of control, a real threat to the order of our world? We examine the other and empower the strange to look back at the normal, dissecting its composition to reveal cracks. We design a gaze that addresses the threshold between the ordinary and its underlying discomfort. The projections become perception-challenging interfaces. Border regions become the photographic focus.
We invited the public to a room full of holes, a peep box to other worlds. The grotesque infiltrated the surfaces. Unstable conventions revealed the experimental. Representations became references staring out of the images. The materiality of the slide positives opens up a different »now.« An immediacy taken from a distant time. A time that is not really now anymore.