At Home

Works by Gosbert Adler and Knut Maron

Gosbert Adler, Knut Maron

In the series Interieur (Interior) and Ein Leben (A Life), Gosbert Adler and Knut Maron photographed their former homes over several years. An apartment, a house, filled with the things of a past life, which the family retains today only as memories. Only the mothers continue to live in these rooms where the furniture and everyday necessities seem like a museum, because they have already been there for a lifetime and no longer need to be renewed. Adler’s black-and-white photographs of food containers, cupboard contents and drawers concentrate on the residue of an existence that has long since accepted its disappearance. The person herself is absent here; the life lived is only reflected in the arrangements of bags and cups. Maron took portraits of his ailing mother over years. He contrasts the portraits with pictures of the objects in her house in which the relationship to her is already a memory. ‘In the archive of his images, the desire materialises to skip over the phase of forgetting and to give the life that they record a seamless continuity between existence and being remembered.’ (Andreas Steffens)