Ulrich Gebert’s works address the culturally determined relationship humans have to nature and the environment. The key terms here are order, categorization, hierarchy, functionalization and instrumentalization.

In Eigenface (which translates as ‘one’s own face’), the series that lends the show its title, Gebert explores a visual phenomenon that, due to the ubiquity of digital devices, has been increasingly infiltrating our space both private and public, digital and analogue, namely: facial recognition technology.

The importance of the photographically recorded face no longer entails a formally complete, representational portrait practice; these are operative images linked to other images and information and are only by way of option directed at human viewers (H. Farocki).

Eigenface is presented against the matrix of the photographic portrait’s evolution from likeness to vehicle of inventory and archiving; it makes critical use of its aesthetic patterns and resists the binary while operating on multiple levels of boundary dissolution.