Berlin/Lörick

Agfa« Berlin 2001; c-type print 80 cm x 100 cm, edition: 8

Haus #1« Düsseldorf 2002; c-type print 80cm x 100 cm, edition: 8

Diese wunderbare Aussicht by Martin Sokol
in: Katja Stuke/ Oliver Sieber, Citizen’s Handbook 2004

Wenn Menschen einen Beruf und ein Auto haben, wohnen sie gerne in Häusern mit Gärten und Garagen.Wenn diese Menschen dann später neue Menschen bekommen, blicken sie noch viel lieber ins Grün, ins Blaue oder ins Tal. Auf Hügeln wohnen ist schön, können sich aber nur die anderen leisten. Die, die Jeeps
fahren, Spargel essen und ihre Kinder durch Mobiltelefone erziehen.
Normalerweise ist das genau so. Nur hier, in dieser Stadt ist es genau umgekehrt. Was für ein Glück, das wir arm sind. Richtig nix haben, ist hier wunderbar. Je ärmer man ist, desto schöner wird die Aussicht. Die Wohnaussicht. Je weniger Geld man hat, desto besser wird sie.
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Portrait #12« Berlin 2002; c-type print 60 cm x 45 cm, edition: 8

Portrait #19« Düsseldorf 2002; c-type print 60cm x 45 cm, edition: 8

Portrait #1« Berlin 2002; c-type print 60cm x 45 cm, edition: 8

Portrait #16« Berlin 2002; c-type print 60cm x 45 cm, edition: 8

Citizen’s handbook
In her videostills of everyday scenes in public spaces Katja Stuke isolates fleeting moments from their contexts and suspends them, unanchored, in front of an audience. The images, which have the harsh and distant quality of surveillance camera footage, have an uncanny feel to them. They are paired with Olivier Siebers’ portraits of residents in both a high rise apartment block in Berlin and a housing estate in Düsseldorf. The photographs together address the unstable line between public and private, interior and exterior, and intimate and anonymous life in an urban setting. Texts in German by Martin Sokol.

Citizen’s handbook 2004 by Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber
order: boehmkobayashi.bigcartel.com or printedmatter.org

(Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, text following the introduction to the exhibition, held on 12th of March 2004, Gallery Gaby Kraushaar, Düsseldorf)

Oliver Siebers works follow a different, nonetheless related model of perception, comprising two analogue corpuses of work. Starting from two distinguishable models of urban housing, a high rise tower block in Berlin near the Alexanderplatz and a settlement of semidetached houses in Düsseldorf-Lörick, he shows architectural photographs as well as series of portraits of the respective residents, which were taken in 2002.

[…] But unlike the previous portraits people are not standing in front of a bright background but what looks like a black fond. But this is only the result of a new flashing technique used for the exhibited photographs, which consequently shut out the real surroundings at the same time highlighting the features. Thus the people portrayed become a homogeneous group, gaining in individuality by their belonging to a certain model of urban housing.
Furthermore the black fond serves as a kind of stage setting, meeting the architectural photographs which have been taken against a blackened sky. Even considering the sharp focus of Sieber’s photographs – which is the result of using a large-format camera – this points at the ambivalent relation between photo and reality. continue reading >click

Sammlung (Auswahl):
LBBW Stuttgart