C/O Berlin Talents 2008
Talents 10
The fragile lightness of the models seems disturbing and disquieting in their artificial, unnatural poses. Balanced on all fours with their backs to the ground, facing upward, or lunging forward with torso twisted around to the side, some of these images look more like displays of painful contortion than presentations of bodies and fashion. Their limbs appear unnaturally long and thin—in some poses dangerously fragile—with bones and joints protruding conspicuously. The female models wear white satin underwear, corsets, silk stockings, as well as medical bandages that ...
Talents 11
Strong through their unity, isolated by their traditional, ritualistic life rhythms, withdrawn from the outside world—the Muslim minority in Bulgaria is almost unknown in Europe and takes a very different approach to life than the Western one. In her search for a European conception of values, photographer Pepa Hristova has portrayed the Muslims in her homeland in a series of strikingly poetic photographs. Her staged portraits and snapshots of religious festivities such as weddings and circumcision celebrations break the silence of this national minority. In her photo reportag ...
Talents 12
They seem cool, alluring, slightly absent, and very intentional in their self–presentation. Yet shimmering behind each façade we catch glimpses of fragility, vulnerability, and insecurity – girls who are physically almost adults but not yet mentally secure, and still in search of their own identity. These young adolescents appear in Janina Wick’s series “Thirteen” in sensitive portrayals of a state between childish unselfconsciousness and self-confident femininity. The photographs reveal a fascinating paradox: we can read something in their faces and bodies that they themselves do not yet know, but that they already embody nevertheless ...
Talents 13
What is that person doing climbing urban street trees? Why is he pretending to walk standing on his head in the middle of a street, and why is he dive-rolling under automatic garage doors just as they are about to close? With these kinds of staged situations, entirely disconnected from everyday life, Sebastian Stumpf counteracts the commonness of everyday actions, conditioned spatial experience, and established visual conventions—and by neglecting to provide any answers, he unsettles the viewer’s gaze ...
In January 2008 a specialist jury chose from more than 180 applications the best four positions. Jury members: Barbara Honrath, Goethe Institut, Thomas Weski, curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Timm Rautert, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, Anne-Marie Beckmann, curator der Collection Deutsche Börse Group, and Felix Hoffmann, curator C/O Berlin.