Belongings

Jan Bünnig, Ekaterina Burlyga, Torben Geeck, Bastian Gehbauer, Göran Gnaudschun, Henry Hargreaves, Caitlin Levin, Carina Linge, Eric Meier, Michael Pohl, Ria Patricia Röder, Yana Wernicke, Maria Sturm & Cemre Yesil

The exhibition presents a selection of contemporary still life photographs whose spectrum ranges from artfully arranged images of flowers and food to the meaningfully orchestrated image of a darkroom detail. The desire to convey symbolic, philosophical, religious and socially relevant content using still lifes is not new. Since the discovery of the first still lifes in Greek antiquity and their advancement to an independent art form during the baroque period, artists have been exploring the form for centuries in an ongoing preoccupation with representing objects and dead animals. The methods artists have used to represent transitoriness, life, death and beauty have changed over time, as have the objects themselves. New contemporary vanitas symbols have entered the canon of allegorical visual language. As the exhibition title suggests, these can only carry meaning for certain societies or (sub)cultures.