Evan Roth, Skyscape: Berlin, film still from single channel video, 2024

Participating artists:

Lotta Antonsson

Lotta Antonsson belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the 1990s, inspired by post-structuralist theory and art exploring new media as it pertains to identity formation. For three decades now, her work has questioned the objectification of women with irony and self-distance. Her exploitation of lens-based images disseminated via printed matter is at the heart of this project. Antonsson experiments with different materials from her archive by complementing vintage photographs from fashion, erotic, and lifestyle magazines with natural objects such as stones, corals, and shells. Her analogue cuts and repetitions seize upon the potential of image fragments to turn clichéd representations into a feminist manifesto. Antonsson’s work reflects her fascination with the late 1960s and 1970s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolutions.

Lotta Antonsson studied fine arts and photography in Stockholm at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design and at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen. Antonsson was a professor of photography (2007-2016) at the Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. Her works have been in numerous international exhibitions, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Magasin III, Stockholm, Capture Photofestival /Trapp projects, Vancouver, Villa San Michele, Capri, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Photobiennale in Brighton, UK, and the Daegu Photobiennale in South Korea.

Inka & Niclas

Inka (Finland) and Niclas (Sweden) Lindergård is an awarded artist duo who works primarily with photography-based art. They have worked together since 2007 and live in Stockholm, Sweden. Inka & Niclas manipulate the visual mechanics of nature photographs and playfully examine the everyday usage of landscape imagery. The artists probe the desire to consume nature through travels and photography, and present oneself as being in harmony with nature. They exhibit and are published internationally on a regular basis. The photographic sculptures in Sunset Photography consist of seascapes and sunsets solidified in a state of wetness. The glass-like, slimy creases of the sculpture hides and obscures. Only parts of the romantic scenery are visible, and we can only imagine the beauty of the initial image, the viewer is thus invited to fill the void with one’s desires and ideas of the perfect shot.

Inka & Niklas’ works are included in the permanent collections at Moderna Museet (Sweden), the Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), Fries Museum (The Netherlands), the Public Art Agency (Sweden) and Arendt & Art (Luxembourg) as well as in private collections in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, France, UK, Switzerland, Slovakia, Portugal, USA, Canada, China, Brazil and Puerto Rico. They were awarded the EMOP Arendt Award 2021 and are represented by Dorothée Nilsson Gallery in Berlin.

Henrik Strömberg

„I work with the idea of metamorphosis, decay and the transformation of materials; sculptural objects and their photographic documentation, as well as the deconstruction and transformation of the photographic image itself. Combining seemingly disparate images, adding pigment, paint and/or cutting out parts of the image I initiate a process in which the image is removed from its context, its referent and expected narrative; I further explored this through the arrangements and combination of works; with the intention to create ambiguous narrations, formations of details, or a kind of temporary entropy. The subjects of my imagery, depicting scenes, spaces, elements, figures, or abstract shapes are less significant than my wish to prompt a deeper sense of reflection, a grasp of the intangible, or a glimpse of the other.” (Henrik Strömberg)

Henrik Strömberg (*1970, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin). He received a B.A in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Art, UK, and went on to pursue an M.A in Photography from FAMU, Academy of Performing Arts Prague, CZ. He works with sculpture, installation and photography, often merging the various media in overarching spatial installations developed to comprise the interaction between sculptural volumes, architectural vocabulary and the use of found objects and collected, reused materials. Strömberg – consecutively – exhibited in Sweden, U.K., Germany, Italy, Poland, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Scotland, Japan, USA, South Korea and Martinique. Collections: Fondazione Morra, Naples, IT, Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich, DE, Ann Wolff Foundation, SE, Christine Symchych Collection, USA, Kultur Hässleholm, SE, Mecklenburgisches Künstlerhaus, Schloss Plüschow, DE, Region Skane, SE, La Luxembourgeoise SA, LUX.

Christer Strömholm

“Working with photographic imagery is for me a way of living. When I think about and look closely at my pictures, they are all in their special way nothing other than a self-portrait; a part of my life.” Christer Strömholm, 1983.

Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) started studying painting in the 1940s with Isaac Grünewald and Otte Sköld. After the end of the war, Strömholm moved to Paris and it was here that he discovered that photography was the form of expression he was looking for. It was in Paris that he later became familiar with thetranssexuals from the area around Place Blanche. Strömholm’s photographic series about them, ‘The Friends of Place Blanche’ (1959-1968) is considered to be his most ground-breaking. ‘The birds of the night,’ as the transsexuals were called, came to be Strömholm’s close friends. Christer Strömholm, the doyen of modern Swedish photography and certainly its most influential figure, has influenced generations with his work. He occupies a central position in international photography history and his work has in no small measure contributed to the establishment of photography as an independent art form. Strömholm knew how to capture the character of an individual in his or her persona, however briefly the latter was revealed. The series in which this succeeded perhaps most impressively is that of his images of Place Blanche in the red-light district of Pigalle in Paris, where he began to photograph transvestites and transsexuals in the mid-1950 ́s. For six years he kept returning and taking photos that indicate a great respect, intimacy and growing familiarity: not a voyeuristic gaze, rather an interest in the figure opposite, whose role play Strömholm also used to question his own viewing practice. “They were questioning their own identity and that was the starting point for my work.” (Christer Strömholm)

Strömholm worked almost exclusively with black and white photography and with the recurring themes of death, life, the private and friends. His photographs can be divided thematically into: Images of Death (1954-1964), Private pictures (1974-1982), signs and traces (1982-1993) and Golgata (1993-1996). With the starting point as the image rather than the technique, Christer changed both the perspective of and the relationship to the photograph within Swedish photography. Using this approach, the photographer would emphasize the subjective in the photograph and highlight oneself as part of the picture. Christer Strömholm’s photos have appeared in many published books and been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide and he is represented in many international collections. He has received several awards, including The Hasselblad Award in 1997.

Evan Roth

Produced from photographs manipulated using mapping projections, Skyscapes explores the distortions of form and scale that are embedded in maps. For centuries, cartographers have wrestled with the impossible problem of representing a curved surface on a flat screen or plane. Constructed from an aerial view, a map is the result of a flattening process or mapping projection that includes unavoidable distortions in form and scale, as well as the biases of the mapmaker. Reversing this cartographic gaze, Skyscapes is a new video series by Evan Roth that explores the sky around the artist’s home in Berlin. Translating these images through historical mapping algorithms dating from 150 AD, Skyscapes attempts to communicate the complex relations between bias and home.

For the past 19 years, Evan Roth has been making work in arts institutions, in public spaces, and on the internet, resulting in paintings, installations, videos, and websites. Based in Berlin, Roth creates work through the misuse of tools and materials to empower and challenge our perceptions of typically unseen aspects of the systems that surround us. Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art NYC and has been exhibited at C/O Berlin, Whitechapel Gallery, Jeu de Paume, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He was the co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) and was awarded ArtAngel’s Everywhere commission.

Vitali Gelwich

Candyshop (2024) is a 3×3 grid of pills happily displayed like a candy store. It mimics the grid of our phones to fit social pleasure even better. 3 rows full of fun. A pill is just a funny little thing. Keep going till you hit the spot. “What’s good for me is good for you. What’s bad for me is bad for you too. Things are things until I eat them up and feel goody goody or baddy baddy.”

Vitali Gelwich, 1990, is an artist and fashion photographer based between Paris and Berlin. Gelwich has become recognised and sought after for a cultivated and timeless aesthetic developed through a rigorous practice and constant search for beauty. His artistic work remains elevated, yet thematically opens up a larger world for us to explore. Gelwich’s work is a consistent invitation to reconsider our understanding of a world we take for granted. His rare perspective is born out of curiosity and the act of playing; through subtle transgression and evocative inclinations he illuminates new ways of seeing ourselves and the people around us.

Julian-Jakob Kneer

With BASTARDS (CAREGIVERS), Julian-Jakob Kneer presents monochrome printed silver mirrors with custom-made galvanized frames. Each one features a layered collage of three seemingly random movie posters. Through crossbreeding ready-made opposing narratives and by sifting through themes of morality and the foundational principles of the human psychology, Kneer’s “movie posters” become contemporary zeitgeist artifacts that confront our supposed socio-cultural binaries of right and wrong, art and pop, and sickness and health. Kneer breaks them down into their constituent parts, and releases them for recasting in a value-free queer space.

Julian-Jakob Kneer (b. 1992 in Basel, lives and works in Berlin) holds a MFA from UdK, Berlin (Meisterschüler Prof. Monica Bonvicini. He is current with the solo exhibition PRODIGY at Kunsthalle Kosice c/o VUNU, Bratislava, and has an upcoming solo at Golsa, Oslo, later in 2024. Other exhibitions include a solo presentation at Liste in Basel 2021 with Shore Gallery, and his works have been exhibited in venues across Europe and USA including Kunsthalle Basel (2020); Lubov Gallery, New York (2019); PS120, Berlin (2019); Shore Gallery, Vienna (2019); Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf (2019); fffriedrich, Frankfurt am Main (2018); BIKINI, Basel (2018).

TOKYO/W.T.

Born 1989 in Stockholm, Tokyo studied at Hyper Island, Stockholm, and has exhibited widely in his hometown with the secretive artist collective W.T. This is his first time exhibiting at a gallery in Berlin. His practice engages critically and performatory around economics, current digital trends and the late-capitalism phenomena of “hustleculture”, including but not limited to: crypto-currencies, decentralized finance, darknet “black” markets, grifting, scams and schemes, etc. while questioning notions of victimhood and perpetrator.

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And also, most of the money we do we invest in crypto and defi. I mean, me and my team. I have people all over the world, really. And to be honest, that’s where you make the real money. Actually, I think mostly what I earn come from that shit. Or me, I mean, it’s mainly this guy I got to know through a trading group. He is alright, I still help him a lot. He deposits money into my account, and I buy the crypto and defi that he tells me, and then I send it back to him when it goes up. Actually, most of the money in the trading group is his. Don’t really know where it comes from, but yeah I get a few percent.

Maybe I should introduce you guys? I think he would like you, and he needs people that he can trust. It won’t cost you anything really, as long as you put in some money to start with. He is really cool. You seem like a nice guy. What do you work with now again?

Text by John Falkirk