Silent Chamber

On the occasion of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2017, the Philara Collection shows works by Sabine Dusend and Alex Grein, two young alumni of the Art Academy Düsseldorf. By using photography’s means the two artists approach the essential characteristics of traditional image production, the divergence of man and machine as well as of object and representation.

Referring to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, a principal work within the theory of photography, the exhibition Silent Chamber is similarly overcome by an “ontological desire”. Without being aggressively dissecting, Dusend and Grein perform a tender analysis of visual contents, primarily accentuating the poetics of images. Sabine Dusend analyses the degree between subjective memory and the auratic, metaphysical appearance along the body language or garment design of sacred architecture. She bestows upon the depicted art objects a soulfulness that inevitably forges intimacy. By contrast, Alex Grein dedicates herself to the omnipresence and ephemerality of images. In her work neptuntechnologies she sends photos from her phone over the internet to a printer in the exhibition space. The printed image falls into a water basin and dissolves. The durability of what is depicted and questions about the capability of photographs to represent reality, reference these as “signs that do not consolidate but rather curdle like milk.” With a sensitive intuition for the personal as well as the communal aspects of photography, both Grein and Dusend develop a silent chamber, that lies far away from loud, large-sized glossy images.