Candida Höfer: Groups Work since 1968

The exhibition at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art will show photographs by Candida Höfer from several of her different work groups. Beginning with the »Liverpool photos« (1968), which were taken before Höfer studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher, the exhibition covers four decades of her creation and shows works from the series »Türken in Deutschland« (1973 and 1979), »Zoologische Gärten« (1990–2000), the slide projection "80 Pictures" (1996), as well as a selection of photographs taken since the 1980s of public interiors.

The selection of works in terms of content is oriented on criteria such as perspective, color, light, and focus rather than being classified according to location or date. On this basis, the selection presents an index of Höfers’s works that shifts to the center the relationship between subjective gaze and objective depiction. The beholder’s gaze structures representations of serial sequences, of banks and books. This »ordering gaze« follows both the function of the spaces as well as photographic image composition.

In the arrangement, the real (that which is depicted), dissolves nearly completely and the spaces themselves appear as objects. The selection of different photographic formats is tied closely to the exhibition design selected for them. The curatorial design of the exhibition spaces is marked by a route through various spatial situations. Working out the exhibition spaces, as well as projection spaces, gallery space, and studio space makes it possible to create various conditions for perception and thematizes, at the same time, the connection between emergence and presentation of the photographic works.

The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the working group »Ausstellungsdesign und kuratorische Praxis« at the HfG (Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design) under the leadership of Prof. Wilfried Kühn/Doreen Mende.