Herbert List, Unter dem Poseidontempel, Sounion, 1937. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv List © Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Deutschland
Bucerius Kunst Forum
Herbert List: The Magic Eye
May 14 – September 11, 2022
The Bucerius Kunst Forum presents the first international survey exhibition of the work of Hamburg-born photographer Herbert List (1903–1975) in more than two decades. The retrospective spans the artist’s entire career, from his Surrealist works made before 1945 to his visions of life in antiquity and extensive pictorial accounts of non-European cultures, all the way to the male nudes with which List avowed his own homosexuality.
List’s work before 1945 betrays the strong influence of pittura metafisica and Surrealism. Like Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, he strove to visualize the more inscrutable and ambiguous aspects of reality. Many of his photographs, whether taken in Hamburg, Paris, or Athens, exude an aura of mystery and enigma. While travelling in Mediterranean climes, List set out to bring back to life in his pictures the ideals of classical Greek and Roman antiquity. He later revived this magical world in photographs taken amid the ruins of Munich after 1945. After the war, he devoted his energies primarily to photo essays, producing extensive reports on Naples, the Caribbean, and Mexico, published either in book form or in leading magazines such as Life, Heute, and DU. His interest in non-European cultures eventually led to extensive series on Nigerian, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian sculpture. Further chapters in the exhibition explore List’s penchant for the male nude as well as his portraits of modern artists including Picasso, Miró, Braque, Chagall, Calder, and Morandi, and writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ingeborg Bachmann.
The exhibition, a collaboration between the Bucerius Kunst Forum and the Herbert List Archive at the Munich City Museum, presents approximately 220 original photographs dating from 1930 to 1965. Find out more.
Charlotte March, Untitled (Ischia), 1953. 23 x 24 cm, Baryt © Charlotte March, Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg
Deichtorhallen Hamburg:
Falckenberg Collection
Charlotte March
May 21 – August 21, 2022
The major retrospective on Charlotte March (1929–2005) at the Falckenberg Collection focuses on the previously little-known works of this photographer from Hamburg, who is known for her fashion and advertising photos. Her estate, comprising nearly seven thousand works, has been part of the Falckenberg Collection since 2006. It forms the basis for the rediscovery of this photographer, who worked for magazines such as Brigitte, Stern, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, and Twen. Her 1977 self-published book Mann, oh Mann: Ein Vorschlag zur Emanzipation des attraktiven Mannes was widely discussed, since it was the first to explicitly show a female view of the male body.
The exhibition offers an overview of all the artist’s creative periods, from her early photographs in Hamburg in the 1950s to her trips to Italy in the 1960s and her later international fashion and advertising photographs. It focuses in particular on March’s work in and relationship to the city of Hamburg, where she lived throughout her life.
Starting in the 1950s, her highly sensitive view of postwar Hamburg shows the various facets of the city and of human life. Her interest in people and how they make a living, as well as her perspective on the fringes of society and the city, also led her to marginalized, utterly unglamorous places. This behind-the-scenes glimpse of the city shows what life was like for candymakers, blacksmiths, and cashiers, as well as in the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district.
March’s early work in particular made an important, previously little-known contribution to the cultural memory of the city of Hamburg and beyond. The exhibition in the Falckenberg Collection is being realized in close collaboration with Manju Sawhney, a photographer and March’s longtime assistant, as well as archivist of her estate.
Curated by Goesta Diercks and Dirk Luckow in cooperation with Manju Sawhney.
Raed Yassin, The Company Of Silver Spectres, 2021, acrylic spray paint on vintage found photographs. Courtesy of the artist
Deichtorhallen Hamburg:
Hall for Contemporary Art
Currency: Photography Beyond Capture
(Währung - Photografie jenseits der Aufnahme)
May 20 – September 18, 2022
Currency: Photography Beyond Capture (Währung - Photographie jenseits der Aufnahme) explores artistic engagements with photography in the “retinal age,” where images not only act as records and imprints but fundamentally shape acts of seeing and being seen. The exhibition approaches photographs as contextual frames for narrative invention rather than as documents of binding truth or essence. Currency considers how knowledge is sought and reimagined through conceptual approaches to the photographic medium.
The exhibition weaves modes of experimental capture, appearance, multisensory evocation, and archival and documentative practice. In staging works by visual artists and photographers, several motifs will structure Currency: the deconstruction and juxtaposition of visual canons; portrayals of community and social relations from within; countermapping in the Anthropocene across landscapes of extractive capitalism and military occupation; tenderness and the currency of intimacy beyond the conventions of portraiture; and poetic explorations into the alchemical processes of photography.
With work by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Claudia Andujar, Ziad Antar, Vartan Avakian, Ragnar Axelsson, Edson Chagas, Oroma Elewa, Anne-Marie Filaire, Lyle Ashton Harris, Leslie Hewitt, Alfredo Jaar, Lebohang Kganye, Clifford Prince King, Osamu James Nakagawa, Guevara Namer, Marilyn Nance, Rana El Nemr, Mame-Diarra Niang, Otobong Nkanga, Elle Pérez, Jo Ractliffe, Ashfika Rahman, Cecilia Reynoso, RaMell Ross, Fazal Sheikh, Alexey Vasilyev, Carrie Yamaoka, Raed Yassin, and Paul Yeung.
Curated by Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti, Gabriella Beckhurst Feijoo, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Christoph Irrgang, from the series Behind the Scenes, 2021 © Christoph Irrgang
Deichtorhallen Hamburg:
PHOXXI, the Temporary House of Photography
Behind the Scenes
May 20 – August 14, 2022
The two-part exhibition Behind the Scenes in the PHOXXI, the Temporary House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, revolves around processes of exchange and change confronting the institution’s photography collection.
The photographer, businessman, and collector F.C. Gundlach (1926–2021) never thought of collecting solely as an investment, and instead primarily pursued his passion for and commitment to supporting photography. Nonetheless, the private F.C. Gundlach Collection, with its great cultural value, is a powerful cultural “currency” that led to the establishment of the House of Photography in the southern hall of the Deichtorhallen in 2003.
The focus of this exhibition is the relocation of the F.C. Gundlach Collection, which became necessary due to the extensive three-year renovation of the House of Photography building. Hamburg-based photographer Christoph Irrgang understands the relocation of the F.C. Gundlach Collection as an artistic challenge, which he documents in photography in both matter-of-fact and poetic manners. While he is fascinated by the non-public and very intimate working situation in the storage areas, he uses conceptual opposites such as light/dark and interior/exterior to depict visible details of the work with the collection as well as those that remain hidden from view.
Irrgang’s analytical photographic work is complemented by a cooperation with the Hamburg-based photography magazine Photonews. The atmosphere and international flair of Paris Photo—since 1997 the world’s largest photography fair, featuring international galleries, publishers, and prominent figures—is regularly photographed by Photonews editors Anna Gripp and Denis Brudna. The international fair, which takes place every November in the Grand Palais with some two hundred participating galleries and publishers, has long since attained the status of a powerful “stock exchange” for photography. For Gundlach, Paris Photo was an annual event of supreme importance: there he met other collectors, friends, gallerists, and artists, maintained contacts, made new connections, and purchased photographic artworks.
While Irrgang’s color and black-and-white photographs offer detailed insights into the microcosm of a private collection, in videos and numerous photographs from Paris Photo, Brudna and Gripp reveal an exciting and atmospherically concentrated view of the pulsating activity at the international event under the glass dome of the Grand Palais.
Curated by Dr. Sabine Schnakenberg, Curator of the F.C. Gundlach Collection.
Viktoria Binschtok, Lines & Clouds, 2020, digital c-prints, 117 x 69 cm / 117 x 130 cm. Courtesy: © Viktoria Binschtok / Klemm’s Berlin
Hamburger Kunsthalle
Give and Take: Images upon Images
May 19 – August 29, 2022
Give and Take describes the processes of exchange and appropriation of visual material in contemporary photography. More and more images are circulating and migrating across geographical, cultural, and social boundaries. One and the same photograph may appear today in myriad contexts, multiplying its impact exponentially. We have thus lost control of all the meanings that may be assigned to an image once it is released into the world. In this “give and take,” artists appropriate images from a variety of fields as they explore the mechanisms behind the production of realities and identities.
From early picture archives, historical film footage, and museum collections to classic print media and digital images found on social media and through search engines, the artists featured in the exhibition draw on a rich trove of material. With their photographs, films, and installations, the artists respond to images that originated in another time or were made for a different purpose. Featuring work by Viktoria Binschtok, Sara Cwynar, Louise Lawler, Max Pinckers, Walid Raad, Volker Renner, Taryn Simon, Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. Find out more.
Hans Meyer-Veden, Bahrenfelderstrasse in Altona. Estate Hans Meyer-Veden, Stiftung F.C. Gundlach
Jenisch Haus
Chiffren einer Stadt. Photographien von Hans Meyer-Veden
With three interventions by the photographer Michael Meyborg, the mpz film group, and the street artist TONA
May 21, 2022 – February 12, 2023
An exhibition of the F.C. Gundlach Foundation at Jenisch Haus. Curated by Sebastian Lux, Jasmin Seck (Stiftung F.C. Gundlach), and Nicole Tiedemann-Bischop (Director of Jenisch Haus).
Formafantasma, Cambio, 2020, video still
Kunsthaus Hamburg
Formafantasma: Cambio
The exhibition at Kunsthaus Hamburg encompasses three parts of Formafantasma’s longterm investigation and multidisciplinary exhibition project Cambio. In the form of visual essays, they trace the development and regulation of the global timber industry that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in colonized regions. The understanding of nature as a raw material and commodity, as well as the human relationship to nature, is reflected in historical, scientific, and documentary photographs and film footage. The green screen method serves the artists as a key design element, which corresponds visually to the complexity of the narration and sources of information.
The films Cambio and Seeing the wood for the trees investigate how the timber industry has evolved over time and how its governance is structured today, touching upon the European and global regulations involved. The works ask how a networked understanding of materials can be applied to a more holistic approach to design and our relationship to the world. They further draw connections between timber’s physical materiality and the abstract but pervasive conditions of exploitation, colonialism, and consumerism.
The third film Quercus was created in collaboration with the philosopher and botanist Emanuele Coccia. Through its narrative, the work questions our sense of dominance, observing the degree to which humanity is dependent upon the form and physicality of trees from the perspective of an imagined forest. The visuals for this piece are provided by a laser scanner, used for cartography and archaeology and recently adopted by the timber industry to select trees for logging.
Formafantasma is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Since founding the studio in 2009, Italians Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin have championed the need for value-laden advocacy merged with holistic design thinking.
Curated by Katja Schroeder.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint Students and Community Members Outside Northwestern High School (Est. 1964) Awaiting the Arrival of President Barack Obama, May 4, 2016, Flint, Michigan, II, 2016-2017, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches © LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Kunstverein in Hamburg
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Flint Is Family, Act III
May 19 – October 2, 2022
The Kunstverein in Hamburg presents Flint Is Family, Act III by LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982), the final part in a series of photographs documenting the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which started in 2014 and continues today. Through capturing the stories of Flint residents, Frazier shows how industrial and governmental neglect toward the sanctity of the city’s water supply had an immediate impact on community members’ lives. In this final act, Frazier shows how Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, and herself—three African American women from working class backgrounds—were at the helm of bringing resources and care to a community under attack.
Expanding on the legacy of the work of Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison, who photographed 1940s Harlem, Frazier approaches injustices of today as a continuation of this social documentary photography that is as formally astute as it is politically forceful. Frazier’s activism, which focuses on actively addressing issues of social injustice, labor rights, racism, and environmental pollution in cities plunged into decline by deindustrialization, veritably corresponds with the theme of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg: currency.
Curated by Nicholas Tammens.
Album with studio portraits, city views and landscape photographs from Singapore; 1886; MARKK Photographic Collection © MARKK, Photo: Paul Schimweg
MARKK – Museum am Rothenbaum. World Cultures and Arts
Archive of Experiences
May 20 – October 2022
Photographs often appear to be records of past moments, events, and memories. With materials spanning different geopolitical regions and social backgrounds from all over the world, the photo archive becomes a fountain of intersecting histories. The focus of the exhibition Archive of Experiences at the MARKK is a photo album from 1868 linked to the city of Singapore and a Hamburg merchant family. The exhibition addresses the multivalent memories and contested meanings of such an originally private assemblage of images now part of the MARKK photographic collection. The visual encounter of the subjects, the materiality, and the means of distribution will together resonate with currency as the underlying theme of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg.
The exhibition features visually compelling images depicting people, landscapes, and architecture related to Singapore and Southeast Asia from the first decades of photography. Premised on the museum as a place with potential to open up new frames of references in which photographs can interrupt dominant narratives, the exhibition seeks to reclaim perceptions that have been formed through the consumption of photographs, specifically in scenarios where photographs have been used as tools to register and fix identities, and to accumulate knowledge and therefore power over others. As an attempt to challenge these patterns of value formation and inscription, MARKK in Motion Artist in Residence Kelvin Haizel will engage with the photo archive to create a corresponding artwork for the exhibition.
Curated by Martha Kazungu and Gabriel Schimmeroth.
Occupation of the HDW yard, 1983. Photo: Michael Meyborg
Museum der Arbeit
Strike! On the Iconography of Protest
This exhibition presents a photographic history of key labor struggles and momentum from the 1960s to the current gig economy. Organized as a set of chapters, Strike! On the Iconography of Protest takes the structural crises of leading regional industries in the Ruhr region and Hamburg in the 1960s and 1980s as a starting point for the development of strike culture in Germany. Further explored are the miners' strike of 1984 in Great Britain, the “sans-papiers” of France, led by migrant workers from 1996 onwards, and the 2012 strike of South African miners in the region of Marikani.
With a focus on photography, Strike! explores how awareness and solidarity spread through a visual culture of labor struggles, affecting both the participants involved and the self-image of trade unions. The majority of the photographs presented were taken by press photographers who accompanied the labor struggles. The photo archive of the Ruhr Museum Essen contains the estates and archives of a number of significant photographers such as Anton Tripp, Manfred Scholz, and Klaus Rose, while series held by the Museum der Arbeit, DOMiD in Cologne, Magnum Paris, and the photographers themselves, enrich this presentation. Through oral history and ephemera, Strike! further aims to center the protagonists of these movements and public response to these actions.
Chris Schwagga. Connections, 2020. Photo: Chris Schwagga
Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte
POWER. MEANS. MONEY.
Image as currency? Currency as image!
May 21 – August 31, 2022
The Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (MHG) presents an installation by the Mexican-German curator Yolanda Gutiérrez, Rwandan photographer Chris Schwagga, and dancer Eva Lomby, which employs the languages of dance and photography to engage with artifacts selected from the museum’s collections. Inspired by the theme of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg and in particular by MHG’s numismatic holdings of colonial coins, the performance will set these objects in motion via a dance intervention and photographic documentation of the performance. Schwagga will also respond to Lomby’s contribution as a source of inspiration drawn from the expressive power of the body. Several contexts will be engaged by this collaboration: historical, (post-)colonial, cultural, social, aesthetic, and technical. At the same time, Schwagga takes up the view of the formerly colonized to consider the meaning and function these coins had, and for whom. The project also engages the various economic, social, and cultural effects of the introduction of colonial currency into the former colony of German East Africa, offering a set of alternative perspectives that shed different light on history.
Herbert List, Instructive View of the Chest, 1944, gelatin silver print. Herbert List Estate Hamburg © Magnum Photos / Herbert List Estate Hamburg
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G)
Präuschers Panoptikum: A photo book by Herbert List
May 19 – September 18, 2022
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg takes a new look at two work complexes by the Hamburg photographer Herbert List (1903–1975). The notion of currency focuses attention on the power of photography to impart significance, create visibility, and instigate processes of social re-evaluation. With these considerations in mind, the exhibition Präuscher’s Panoktikum: A Photo Book by Herbert List presents List’s book to the public for the first time. In 1944, when List made his photographs, the Panoptikum displayed historical figural groups, fairytale scenes, and a chamber of anatomical wonders. In dimly lit rooms, medical subjects were illustrated using female nudes, resulting in a mix of popular science and erotic enticement. List viewed this world through the nostalgic eyes of a connoisseur of the antiquated and bizarre—a mode of entertainment long out of fashion by the time List set out to bring the scenes back to life with his camera, conceiving his book as a guide through an artificial world.
The second part of the exhibition is devoted to List’s photographs of young men and sculptures, which have been rediscovered as bellwethers of the queer gaze. List’s erotic gaze and his effort to create art that inspired a physical response rather than being glanced at in passing with disinterested complacency led him to photograph the torsos of Greek statues and the bodies of young men in an equally erotic manner, so that marble becomes skin and skin, marble. These themes are linked by the interest displayed by the openly gay photographer in pop culture and kitsch, and in eliciting in the viewer a visceral reaction. The exhibition features around one hundred of List’s photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as magazine articles, wax figures from the Vienna Wax Museum, and the original book layout for Präuscher’s Panoptikum. Find out more.
