with Simon Lehner, artist
and Annekathrin Kohout, author and guest professor at the Berlin University of the Arts

For Simon Lehner, photographs are a Building Block – essential and changeable at the same time. They serve as the starting point for his artistic practice, which reflects the social practices of dealing with images as well as their multi-layered possibilities and limitations. Never before have images been as powerful and at the same time as marked by mistrust as they are today.
In the artist talk, we will take an analytical but also sceptical look at contemporary image culture – and at what Simon Lehner opposes to it artistically: complex imaging processes, the transformation of digital structures into physical presence and the targeted staging of technical disturbances – the glitches – which he sees as the digital counterpart to the blurring of human memory. One focus of the discussion will be the current social backlash, which can be seen in new old images of masculinity, among other things – and how Simon Lehner's works visualise and question these dynamics.