Martina Sauter. Newsfiction:2

In the organizer's words:

MARTINA SAUTER
NEWSFICTION:2
Lido at the Malkasten (Bar)

How do images from real life relate to consciously staged images from television series? What different levels of reality and unreality are there and when and how do they even merge? Martina Sauter, who graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy as a master student of Thomas Ruff, explores these questions in her latest series of works "News:Fiction".

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the photographer collected images she found in current news reports as screenshots from the internet. She also added stills from a science fiction series. In "Fortitude", a production enriched with mystery elements, a pathogen changes the behavior of the population of the city of Fortitude and causes conflicts due to the psychotic behavior of the infected inhabitants. Sauter places the images from the daily press found on television and the Internet in a dialog with the stills, expanding this series with photographs from the time when she herself was in quarantine due to corona. We see laboratories, operating theaters and treatment rooms, deserted rooms, mysterious objects.

But what is real and what is fiction? Looking back, all the images seem realistic, as many of these scenes are etched in our collective memory. And they all benefit from photography's promise of realism. By using the historical process of the cyanotype, Martina Sauter blurs their different sources and equates them all. The real becomes unreal, the unreal becomes real.

The opening of the exhibition will take place at the same time as the opening of Carl Emanuel Wolff in the Vitrine in the Hentrichhaus.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf.

Martina Sauter "NEWSFICTION:2" is in the program of düsseldorf photo+ Biennale for Visuel and Sonic Media (17 May - 14 July 2024).