C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018

Stefanie Moshammer / Andreas Prinzing
Carnalist, 2015 © Stefanie Moshammer . From the Series I Can Be Her
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationsansicht
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationview © David von Becker

C/O Berlin is delighted to award the first C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018 in the photography category to the Austrian artist Stefanie Moshammer (b. 1988, Vienna) and will present her work in the solo exhibition Stefanie Moshammer . Not just your face honey from 07 July 2018 to 29 September 2018 at C/O Berlin in the Amerika Haus at Hardenbergstrasse 22–24, 10623 Berlin.

Stefanie Moshammer’s photographs—comprised of different media—illuminate the complexity of our contemporary perception. Using existing materials, she develops her own photographs, charts pictures using Google Maps and uses film footage and video as well as fictional shots and images from her own imagination. In doing so, she creates new forms of documentation while combining fictional and narrative moments and touches on fundamental photographic themes: What is reality? What is fiction? Which truths does the photographic image convey?  

Winners

Stefanie Moshammer
was born in Vienna in 1988, where she continues to live and work. After graduating from the Fashion School Vienna, she completed her bachelor of arts in visual communication and photography at the University of Art and Design Linz as well as a course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus. Moshammer received a nomination within the Rencontres d’Arles festival, was selected as a FOAM Talent and nominated for the ING Unseen Talent Award at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines including i-D, Collector Daily, GUP Magazine, It’s Nice That, ZEITmagazin, New York magazine, FOAM Talent Issue, and VICE.

C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationsansicht
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationview © David von Becker
Zitat von Theorist Andreas Prinzing: Images can provoke emotions and misunderstandings, hit us in the head, or draw us in magically.
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018 Theorist, Andreas Prinzing

Andreas Prinzing
(born 1980 in Mainz) studied art history and worked at the Kunsthalle Mainz and at Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Among other roles, he has worked as an assistant to the curator Kasper König since 2015 and was involved in the planning of Sculpture Projects Münster 2017. He also has ties to the Rhineland region, specifically with the Peill Foundation at the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, where he recently curated exhibitions with Haris Epaminonda and Rana Hamadeh. His writings have been published in works including Eyes on the City: Urbane Räume in der Gegenwartsfotografie (Salzburg, 2012), Unbeugsam und Ungebändigt – Dokumentarische Fotografie um 1979 (Cologne, 2014), and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 (Leipzig, 2017). He writes regularly for Camera Austria.

Jury

Stefanie Moshammer and her work won over this year’s jury members—Diane Dufour (LE BAL, Paris), Shoair Mavlian (Tate Modern, London), Aaron Schuman (freelance critic and curator, London), Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation) and Ann-Christin Bertrand (C/O Berlin)—as an extraordinary example of the current debate on the discourse surrounding the topic of New Documentary Photography. Her solo exhibition at C/O Berlin will allow her to present her work to a broad public at an international level. ARTE will support the C/O Berlin Talent Award as media partner and the prizewinner’s exhibition.

Die Jury: Diane Dufour (LE BAL, Paris), Shoair Mavlian (Tate Modern, London), Aaron Schuman (freier Kritiker und Kurator, London), Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation) und Ann-Christin Bertrand (C/O Berlin)
Our Jury: Diane Dufour (LE BAL, Paris), Shoair Mavlian (Tate Modern, London), Aaron Schuman (art critic and curator, London), Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation) and Ann-Christin Bertrand (C/O Berlin)
Shortlist
Portrait I + Portrait VIII, Aus: Scentic Utah, 2016 © Stephan Bögel

Stephan Bögel
takes the viewer on an investigative journey in which he makes use of stylistic devices from documentary and reportage photography. Through his selection, manipulation, and (re-) combination of images, incorporating these together with found materials and written texts, Bögel creates new levels of visual narrative. Artificially illuminated forests, a taxidermy owl, branches in the darkness, details from an isolated town, gray houses, front yards, entrances and exits, garages and cars, old photos from a family album, alternating with vividly colored, grainy landscape photographs of the canyons and deserts of Utah: Stephan Bögel’s most recent book of photography, Scenic Utah (2016), is an attempt to come to terms with his father’s suicide. In between his own and fictional photographs that sometimes look like postcard photos, he intersperses textual fragments and excerpts from police files. Bögel pushes the bounds of documentary photography to create another kind of visual dramatization and new forms of narrative that intersect in their own unique ways with the current discourse on the photographic image.

Mafalda Rakoš
works in a documentary mode, exploring socially relevant and often sensitive themes. Her works range from portraits of students at the Lycée de Kafountine in Senegal in the series Il y’a des jours sombres (2012) and 3rd Generation (2013), a series exploring the conflicts in the Middle East, to I want to disappear— Approaching Eating Disorders (2015), a series dealing with eating disorders as life-threatening diseases affecting numerous young girls. At their core, all of these works revolve around human beings, their identities, and their bodies, which the artist documents photographically. She generally follows her subjects for many years to create an intimate perspective and establish personal relationships. With her narrative and journalistic approach, she enlightens but without lecturing. She thinks beyond the limits of the medium and collages her photographs with texts, drawings, and objects. In so doing, she constantly challenges the forms of documentary photography in new ways. 

Abdominal Girth, 2014 © Mafalda Rakoš

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques’s
perspective is one of ongoing reflection on photography and its representational character. His use of visual strategies and ways of thinking that span a range of media are essential to his artistic practice. Couzinet- Jacques’s works deal with themes of property, economic injustice, community, and capitalism—whether in images of the real-estate crisis in Spain, the uprisings of the militant Black Block, or in his long-term project on the historical building Eden in North Carolina that he purchased for 1,000 US dollars in April 2010. Particularly his artistic engagement with the small former schoolhouse Eden, built in 1884, underscores the historic questions he is grappling with in his work. After purchasing the building, he had it renovated and painted bright red with grants from the Hermès Foundation in alliance with the Aperture Foundation. The building has become a leitmotif and source of inspiration in his work, and he has documented it obsessively with his camera. He combines and incorporates traditional photographic film, Polaroids, video, found objects, historical, as well as sculptural elements to create new visual documents in his own unique form of visual narrative. 

Joscha Steffens’s
photographs and video works exist as images at the intersection of documentation, reality, and fiction. Often they deal with forms of staged and simulated violence: real war games with airsoft weapons, or parallel digital worlds and virtual battles that audiences of millions can watch online in real time. In these works, Steffens acts not just as a photographer and silent observer but in many cases also as a player. In his most recent project, Teen Spirit Island (2015), he followed young gamers from the League of Legends for more than three years—players who are among the elite of the gaming world, who live in gaming houses, tour the world like pop stars, and earn fortunes with their professional computer gaming. Years before this portrait series of pro-gamers in the MOBA (Multiple Online Battle Arena)—images of sunken faces, deep in concentration, illuminated only by the harsh light of computer monitors in surrounding darkness—Steffens created his series OPFOR–Wildboyz I–III (2011–12). This earlier series also consisted of portraits, but these were of people in real-world environments wearing military costumes, preparing to go into battle. His subjects were Russian military veterans who had organized paramilitary groups where they went through physical combat training as “weekend warriors.” Their activities can be seen in a sense as returning military warfare to an “analog” form, as war becomes increasingly virtual through the use of long-distance weapons. This intermingling of virtual and real world gives rise to hybrid creatures that merge the human and the avatar. In his photographs, Joscha Steffens reveals the complexity and potency of the photographic image beyond the boundaries of its purely representational function in depicting reality.