Schwarzes Licht – Oliver Sieber

with Katja Stuke

DongGang International Photography Festival, South Korea 2023
Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber: Schwarzes Licht
Artists of the Year 2023, Musuem for Photography DongGang

Equivalents« curated by Anja Schürmann, with works by:
Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Vincent Delbrouck, Anne Schwalbe
Kunstraum Düsseldorf 2017

Equivalents by Anja Schürmann

»Perhaps the only thing that points to a time is rhythm; Not the recurring beats of the rhythm, but the gap between two such blows, the gray gap between two black beats: the tender interval.« Vladimir Nabokov, Ada oder Das Verlangen.

Photography is a strange medium, an idiosyncratic mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It is very good to document everyday reality, and yet it is only capable of grasping silent, frozen surfaces.
Photographing something everyone percieves on any day is difficult. To compress grass as if you saw grass for the first time. Turn a cloud into a sculpture of cotton candy. And yet it should be grass or condensed water. The exhibited photographers master this alienation performance. They make us see things as if we see them for the first time, although they are more than familiar to us.
With the title „Equivalents“ I refer to Alfred Stieglitz „Cloud Images“, which had the claim to create an analogy between the order of things, feelings and signs. Stieglitz called the approximate 400 recordings, which he created starting from 1922 „direct evelations of a man’s world in the sky – documents of eternal relationship“ . By that he freed photography from „content“, allowing art to depend not on a decisive moment, not on the arbitrary presence of things. Clouds are free, open to everyone, there are no privileges attached to them, yet his photographs are an attempt to create a sensation and form and thus to save a moment. >continue reading click