In the exhibition EXTREME. SELF, three artists deal with aspects of the perception of the self that are as personal as they are imaginative. “Selfie” by Aneta Grzeszykowska (* 1974 PL) has only the name in common with mobile phone self-portraits. She creates a portrait of herself from many individual parts and mixes physicality, sensuality and autoerotism with black humor. Precisely shaped body parts are combined, arranged and photographed as in natural science collections. By using pigskin, they look deceptively real on closer inspection. This is disturbing and attractive at the same time.
Another approach followed Laís Pontes (* 1981 BR / US). She questions the aspect of identity formation and makes use of social media. She photographed Born Nowhere in various roles and put these pictures on a Facebook page for discussion. Online, each portrait received a vita from the collected comments of the Facebook users. Based on this, four characters in “Born Now Here” have been further developed by being entrusted to selected Facebook members as Alter Ego.
The work of Isabelle Wenzel (* 1982 DE / NL) is located entirely in the real world. Her photographs are the result of an acrobatic performance in front of the camera. It positions itself in unusual, seemingly impossible postures in strangely unspectacular locations. In the self-timer photo, her body becomes a sculpture in space, her own personality recedes into the background, the face remains hidden. For the exhibition, she has specially taken new pictures in Darmstadt for the field studies, which will be shown for the first time.
