Image-Making as Play.
Follow the rule of thirds, catch the decisive moment,
Master the shutter speed, play against the camera,
Collect likes and followers, challenge everything,
Fight the apparatus, win the game.

How to Win at Photography manifesto

With:
Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, Justin Berry, Alan Butler, Gloria López Cleries & Sive Hamilton Helle, Joan Pamboukes, Tabor Robak, Constant Dullaart, Yuyi John, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Coralie Vogelaar, Jon Haddock, Roc Herms, Sherrie Levine, Lorna Ruth Galloway, Ed Ruscha, Ai Weiwei, Harun Farocki, Dorothée Elisa Baumann, Dries Depoorter & Max Pinckers, Christopher Graves, John Hilliard, Steven Pippin, Ria Patricia Röder, Akihiko Taniguchi, Claude Cahun, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Andy Kassier, Cindy Sherman, Petra Szemán, Danielle Udogaranya.

How to Win at Photography: Image-Making as Play is a new multimedia exhibition exploring the relationships between photography, image-making and play.  It invites audiences to focus on the playful aspects of visual culture, and creates unexpected connections between the history of photography and the practices of image-making within computer games and wider digital screen culture.

Featuring over 30 international artists and a rich assemblage of multimedia artworks and vernacular images representing a variety of positions across contemporary and twentieth century photography, How to Win at Photography questions the very meaning and function of photography today.

The exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm will address AI-related issues like hidden human labor, algorithmic bias/discrimination, the problem of categorization and classification, and our imaginations and phantasms about AI, and it will also ask the question about whether (and how) it is possible to regain agency in this context. More than 20 artworks by international artists will be presented in an exhibition which will be subdivided into seven thematic chapters and whose scenography will be reminiscent of a giant house of mirrors. In May 2022, a 200-page bi-lingual catalogue will be published (German/English) as printed matter and as a free online PDF.

Participating artists:
Aram Bartholl, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Stéphane Degoutin, Sean Dockray, Jake Elwes, Anna Engelhardt, Nicolas Gourault, Adam Harvey, Libby Heaney, Lauren Huret, Zheng Mahler, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Simone C Niquille, Elisa Giardina Papa, Julien Prévieux, Anna Ridler, RYBN, Sebastian Schmieg, Gwenola Wagon, Conrad Weise, Mushon Zer-Aviv

Curatored by:
Inke Arns, Francis Hunger, Marie Lechner

„Alle Gegenstände, die uns umgeben, haben eine eigene Seele, haben menschliche Qualitäten, weil sie nur in einer menschlichen Welt existieren. Es gibt eigentlich keine Gegenstände, die der Mensch wahrnimmt. Es gibt keine rohen, unmenschlichen Objekte. In dem Moment, in dem Möbel, Häuser, Brot, Autos, Fahrräder oder andere Produkte in unserem Leben auftauchen, sind sie mit uns verbunden, sie sind menschlich.“Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire, Martino Publishing, Mansfield, 2012. S. 93.

Domestic Drama möchte durch den bewusst ​„theatralen Auftritt“ der künstlerischen Arbeiten und die gattungsüberschreitende Art der Inszenierung des Wohnraums eine körperliche Teilhabe beim Publikum herausfordern. Im weiteren Schritt erkennt die Ausstellung Emotionalität als einen wichtigen Faktor für unser Handeln an, das längst nicht mehr autonom von uns selbst sondern auch durch die uns umgebenden Objekte und Prozesse gesteuert wird. Die poetische aber dennoch subversiv-kritische Narration, die in Domestic Drama gesponnen wird, versucht so die Vielschichtigkeit der Fragen, Probleme und Mechanismen, die in unserem Alltag im ​„Zuhause” auftauchen, ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit zu rücken.

Curated by Cathrin Mayer

With:
Larry Achiampong, Ayo Akingbade, Aram Bartholl, Camille Blatrix, Oscar Enberg, Vera Frenkel, Nigel Gavus & İlkin Beste Çırak, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Kaarel Kurismaa, Nicola L., Bertrand Lavier, Olu Ogunnaike, Laura Põld, Bruno Zhu

Decisions are the result of complex cognitive processes. Considering them collectively when they involve our shared futures makes them harder to make. But, more and more often, we include machines into such processes through algorithms qualified as decisional. Of course, it raises questions that artists know how to put into perspective. Because of the age that we are currently living in, a brief instant regarding the whole history of our planet, is decisive considering the choices available to us for a responsible development of Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, it is now that human rights are at stake, for instance, about what will emerge from the use of our personal data. The consideration of artworks coming from decisive processes connecting humans to machines could only spring us into an immediate future that still belongs to us.

Curated by Dominique Moulon & Alain Thibault

Artistic Directors: Carol Yinghua Lu, Luo Xiaoming
Curatorial Team: Huang Wenlong, Li Xiangning, Liang Chouwa, Yin Shuai, Jerome, Zhou Boya, Zhu Siyu

Our relationships with digital devices have become closer during the pandemic, maybe even closer than we would wish for. Digital technology helps us make connections and it can take the place of face-to-face encounters like a prosthesis. It expands our sensorium and creates projection surfaces for our desires. Digital helpers are increasingly tailored to our intimate human needs. But can human closeness really be relegated to a machine?  The exhibition “Me and My Machine” sheds light on the symbiosis between humans and digital machines. In both humorous and serious ways, it questions our current relationship to everyday digital tools: Where are the possibilities and limits? How are our desires satisfied and how do dependencies and impotence in the face of problems in our society manifest themselves? The exhibition invites visitors to experiment with creative digital tools, to interact with paintings and installations and to interrogate their own bodies. Visitors will be able to enter virtual worlds and be encouraged to exchange ideas about changing habits and about their experiences with delimitation and return.

The participating artists are: Ant Eye (Hanneke Klaver und Tosca Schift), Sophie de Oliveira Barata (The Alternative Limb Project), Aram Bartholl, Candoco Dance Company, Beate Gärtner, Susanna Hertrich, Tomasz Kwapien, Till Nachtmann and Stefan Silies, Johanna Reich, Becker Schmitz.