What is real?

The current exhibition “Realer Raum Bild Raum”(“Real Space Pictured Space”) at the Milli Reasürans Sanat Galerisi shows the work of three different German artists and thereby three different styles of modern German photography.

Heidi Speckers transforms her photographs with the help of computer programs and on the first glance the buildings shown are hardly recognizable. So photographs which are a tool to picture reality become unreal and the artists becomes the creator of a new reality. This is directly visible in Heidi Speckers work.

Compared, Thomas Demand’s own reality is not so obvious at first. Out of paper he  creates whole scenes of rooms as well as of typical objects found in a flat and later takes photographs. As an observer you first think it is a real photograph, yet something seems to be strange. When you take a closer look at his work you recognize his “paper-trick”.

The “closest to reality” are Susanne Brügger’s views of a city. Several photographs of a city are exposed in kind of a scientific way: Susanne Brügger lays a grid of coordinates over her photographs with a scale so that they remind you of a map. And what could be realer than a photographed map? But if you take your time looking at the photographs carefully you realize that all of them are showing the same scenery and are part of one “big picture”, only focusing and enlarging different parts of it. The solution lays in one of her last pictures: an overview of this compilation which looks like a puzzle.

All the artists deal with rooms, as in cities, buildings or chambers. All of the artists work with photography. But looking at all of their work, especially shown together, the question is: What is real?