Media and social processes are continually changing our world and creating new, "in-between" spaces, spaces where any distinction between facts and fictions become blurred. Photographers, but also film and video artists, have explored the theme of "worldwide" in recent years, challenging common perceptions of reality. This challenge has focused on the everyday practice of how we consume images in our urban spaces and the news images reaching us from seemingly every point on the globe. We believe that we know these places, and yet time and again their remoteness takes us by surprise and fascinates.
The twenty participating photo, film, and video artists present scenes from such places. Curated by Brigitte Franzen, the imaginary map of the exhibition extends from the town of Kohlscheid on the periphery of Aachen to Beijing, from Cairo to Peru, and from Berlin to Chandigarh. In between, there is Naples, Amsterdam, Fukushima, Hong Kong, Pyongyang, Marseille, and Bratislava. The result is a mosaic of imaginary and real terrains which ultimately form and visually reproduce our world. In the process, it becomes clear that our conception of the world is composed of diverse structural, social, political, and cultural parameters, and cannot do without images which satisfy our intellectual and visual curiosity for the "other" and people in other places.
The City That Doesn't Exist: Images of Global Spaces
Ludwig Forum Aachen
Aachen, Germany
.jpg.foto.rmedium.jpg "Armin Linke, <em>Thongil Street, Pyongyang North Korea</em>, 2001. Courtesy Galerie Klosterfelde")