Die Gegenwart

ANNA DAKI

Anna Daki is a Ukrainian photographer who lives and works in Berlin. Daki has built a stellar career over the last decade, working with international publishers and brands including Leica, The Guardian, and Vogue. Her background in art and architecture helps Anna to create and capture exceptional views on human beauty.

Anna Daki’s inspiration is the human body. To Daki, the body’s relationship to the elements, and how it interacts with them, is the ultimate expression of freedom. An anonymous body submerged, contorted, in action, ever changing. Suspended in water, the body is a shape, a subject and merely another creature amongst billions. Humans and nature are constantly changing, breathing, offering infinite possibilities of discovery. In a world of a constant restrictions, Daki presents water as the substance of freedom, where we can all find respite.

GABRIELLA ACHADINHA

Gabriella Achadinha is a South African photographer, writer and designer based in Berlin. Her photographic work is heavily influenced by the cinematic. Drawn to scenes of individual stillness and contemplation, architectural spaces, personal relationships to public areas and snippets of the daily, her aim is to hone in on the essence of a frame‘s narrative. With ‚Insert (Narrative)‘, Achadinha challenges the prevailing notions of the photographed “African experience” as captured and presented by predominantly white, male photographers. Guided by the trends observed in photographic contests and coffee table books of successful photographers, these shots imitated, whether unconsciously or consciously, the celebrated testament of what is still a narrowly perceived viewpoint of Africa. This series confronts the ‘ghosting’ of autonomous storylines by intentionally removing the subjects from the imagery. Presented as ghosts composed of canvas, white floating figures fill the frame – void of features or emotionally-charged expressions. There is no sense of idiosyncrasy or mutual collaboration between photographed and photographer, the pattern is repeated as it’s proven to bring success and artistic acclaim to one part of the party – a code bound to return a desired result.

JAVIER ALEJANDRO CERRADA

Javier Alejandro Cerrada is a Venezuelan photographer based in Berlin. Cerrada presents two series in this exhibition – ‚Recreational crossdressing‘ and ‚Post-Pandemic Contacts‘.‚Recreational crossdressing‘ is an ongoing series celebrates the joy of living in-between. It explores the different ways in which its subjects enjoy crossing their roles and transforming them into parts of their identity. In ‚Post-Pandemic Contacts‘, Javier Cerrada creates a visual medley of illicit contacts. These images, taken between May and June of 2021 in Berlin, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, showcase different expressions of the city’s residents’ desperate cravings for human contact.

JIUK KIM

Jiuk Kim is a South Korean photographer based in Berlin. Jiuk is a multidisciplinary photographer, working primarily with portrait, street, and fine art photography. ‚Lost and Found (2021)‘ is an homage to Kim’s home town of Jeju, South Korea, viewed through the lens of nostalgia. In an almost meditative process of using light and movement in the darkroom, Kim is able to reveal images of shells and stones that are ubiquious to the Island’s landscape. With relentless intensity, the artist focuses on every step, on every split second of exposure, gaining the confidence and motivation needed to contemplate times gone by. The rendered shapes and colors are dreamlike and ethereal, almost ephemeral, in the way that memories fade with time. It is in the darkness of the lab that Jiuk Kim can recreate the past.

KANE HOLZ

Kane Holz is a Berlin-based art director and multi-disciplinary photographer, specialized in urban architectural and documentary photography. Holz’s visual work focuses on street culture & the urban environment. With his ‚kanescans‘ series, he adds a new dimension to his photographic ouvre, which – in contrast to the clean and crisp aesthetic he creates in his editorial work for global brands showcases the raw authenticity of the city’s youth. Internet culture of today, especially that of social media, is based on ongoing, performative self-presentation. For ‚kanescans‘, Kane Holz shoots intimate social situations on compact film cameras, capturing candid moments that would otherwise not make it to an Instagram feed. The series rejects social networks‘ standard aesthetic of group shots against the backdrop of an orange sunset or an exposed brick wall. Instead, it immortalizes moments of euphoria and rebellion in their purest manifestations.

LAURENT POLEO-GARNIER

Laurent Poleo-Garnier is a French visual artist, photographer, stylist, drag queen & dancer. Poleo-Garnier‘s practice hones in on Berlin’s plurality of bodies, beauties, and their artistic expressions.Poleo-Garnier photographs strangers on the streets; in clubs, shops and other places around the city, and focuses on creating portraits that transform the subject’s identity while maintaining their strength, fragility and uniqueness. Resulting in a balanced mix of theatricality and artifice with a form of nonchalance, the series gives the viewer a feeling of proximity with the humans in front of the lens. Their transformations into characters are fascinating, as they are but new manifestations of their identities, which were perhaps hidden. Poleo-Garnier’s aim is to create again a deep sense of community through faces, with one message: We are present and we can dream.

LE QUYEN NGUYEN

Le Quyen Nguyen is a Berlin-based street and portrait photographer. Her works provide an intimate glimpse into Berlin’s young and unapologetic creative scene. Nguyen’s photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Berlin and Tokyo and her work has been published in various independent magazines. For ‚Die Gegenwart‘, Le Quyen presents a personal project that explores the experiences of young German citizens of Southeast Asian descent. ‚Where It Hides‘ investigates how second-generation immigrants negotiate their identity between cultural symbiosis and cultural clash. With this series, Nguyen celebrates Vietnamese heritage by portraying Anh, a Vietnamese-German, donning clothes and accessories from her family’s homeland. In doing so, Nguyen opens up a dialogue about how it’s like to live between two cultures, a life full of difficulties that is invisible to her German peers.

MARCUS RIGGS

Marcus Riggs is a photographer and creative director from the United States, who lives and works in Berlin. He draws inspiration from cinematography, art history, photography, travel, and social and cultural insights and trends. Riggs presents three series in the exhibition. In the first ‚Strangers of the Pandemic‘, he employs the narrative of Teo’s life, a stranger he met during his first trip abroad to Greece after the successive lockdowns of 2020/21, to speak about issues of self-love and body positivity.

‚Again Again, I Rise‘, is a series of nude scenes inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise”. Stripped from the worldly materials that dress us as individuals, Riggs aimed to capture what makes us uniquely individual and yet the same from the bare skin we inhabit, in an ecosystem that brings us solace, balance, and tranquility. Through all of the pain we may have endured thus far, and which we will continue to endure, we will also continue to rise, time and again. With ‚Balancing Survival‘, Marcus aims to illustrate a reflection of one‘s interpersonal relationship with themselves during a continued stretch of isolated lockdowns during a pandemic, digging into the past, acknowledging old trauma, and confronting the depths of our souls we want to fix. Balancing the ups and downs of a carefree life previously lived, with the more constructed one we are living now. Riggs sees this time as an opportunity to change; to reveal the previously intangible qualities that live in one‘s spirit, and which guide us through our own pathways to peace.

PAULA THOMAS

Paula Thomas is a photographer, curator, editor and visual artist who lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a member of photography collectives Women Photograph, MUTANTE, and Reojo Colectivo, and a former editor at VICE Colombia. The series ‚Señorita Oasis‘ (‚Miss Oasis‘) portrays an obscure reality in vibrant colors, superimposing fantasy onto the complex lives of the dwellers of Oasis 1, a social reintegration center for homeless women in Bogotá, Colombia. As part of its daily recreational initiatives, the beauty pageant ‘Miss Oasis’ was created. For these women, what started as a leisurely activity quickly became something much more profound and meaningful; it became an exercise in facing their own (self-)image. Their bodies show scars, wounds and burns; bodily reflections of the brutality of life on the street. Señorita Oasis was a space for them to reconcile with their bodies subjected to varying degrees of abuse. The series aims to celebrate diversity and empower women and nonbinary people through photographs that counter gender stereotypes present in beauty pageants all around the world.

RHIANNON ADAM

Rhiannon Adam is a London-based photographer specialising in portraiture and social documentary projects. For ‚Die Gegenwart‘, Adam presents two photographs from the ‚Places I’ve Been‘ series. These two pictures of Arlington House, in the coastal town of Margate in England, show a resident’s window as it displays slogans in support of a second Brexit referendum seemingly alone in a district that voted in favour of leaving the European Union. The images convey feelings of isolaton, claustrophobia and enclosure. Viewing the facade from afar, the viewing experience is almost voyeuristic. Her long-term projects combine art photography and social documentary, often focusing on narratives relating to myth, loneliness, and the passage of time. The results of these explorations are captured almost exclusively in ambient light through the hazy abstraction of degrading instant- film materials and colour negative film, and are often contrasted with the stark reality of archive material.