Artist
Maximilian Glas
Maximilian Glas (1998) works in multimedia artistic practice, focusing on the influence of technical images on social power relations.
Current projects investigate the production of scientific representations of the natural and how moral conclusions are constructed on their basis, claiming universal validity due to their natural origin. The medium of photography and its relationship to objectivity and the circulation of knowledge through representation, serves as a thinking model for these explorations.
Website: www.maximilianglas.de
Weather Contructions
The video work Weather Constructions consists of digital photogrammetric models. The debris of buildings, streets, organisms and plants meet the interior of a TV studio for weather forecasting and scientific instruments that are used in current weather research. Scanned after destructive floods and during scientific field tests, the digital models form a barren studio landscape: an image production site in which the hand of a weather presenter repeatedly gestures above the imaginary territory of temperatures, sun rays, and cloud accumulations. At the core of the human encounter with nature is the making of models. Through the abstraction and reduction of natural phenomena, knowledge is generated in order to gain control over one‘s own environment. Clouds take on a special role in these endeavors because their complex microphysical processes are largely unexplored. They are the weakest link in climate modeling processes. Imaging techniques based on photography are fundamental tools to better understand and model the processes in clouds. Using so-called holographic imagers, which are inserted into clouds by researchers using helium balloons, large databases of holographic images of individual cloud particles can be created. The images of these particles - the smallest units of the cloud - are categorized and simulated by trained neural net- works. In Weather Constructions, this holographic image data was converted to an audio track to point to the tradition of photographic cloud atlases. Ultimately, Weather Contructions is also a documentary experiment that reveals problems of the territory-map relationship in representative images of natural phenomena. In doing so, the project also adopts the processes it represents as its own method. The classic photographic image is extended into the third spatial dimension through digital photogrammetry, where a neural network attempts to construct a 3D shape based on the photographs. In this speculative process, visible errors, holes, and deformations are created, which emphasize on their modelledness. By this, the documentary character of the project and visual signifiers of objectivity are to be undermined, to point to the visual constructions of (natural) objects.
Returning time and again to the rural areas and subcultures of her childhood in southern Bavaria, Anna Aicher embarks on photographic examinations of the concepts of home and tradition. In projects such as Like Father, Like Son, she creates calm, concentrated images and enters into an intensive dialogue with her protagonists so that a special intimacy becomes visible.
Nominated by Sithara Pathirana, Project Manager for Triennial Expanded, Maximilian Glas explores the human encounter with nature in his project Weather Constructions. In an almost humorous way, he questions speculative processes of science by also undermining the project's own validity through the display of errors. What is special about Weather Constructions is that it is highly scientific while at the same time an experience for the senses.
Nominated by photographer and lecturer André Lützen, Altay Tuz explores the question of integration and identity in Turkish cultural clubs and cafés in Hamburg and Berlin in his project Members Only. Using his camera to gain access to these spaces, Tuz makes images of full of information, details and signs, ultimately making visible the symbiosis of tradition and the present.
Nominated by Ingo Taubhorn, Chief-Curator House of Photography/Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Simon Grunert's photographic practice is rooted in a documentary approach, but plays with its boundaries. In series including Senne 1 & 2, he often uses specific geographical settings as the basis for his stories but then adds pseudo-scientific or fictional elements, reducing his original intention of conveying a sense of place to the abstract.
Nominated by photographer and lecturer Linn Schröder, Julia Gaes is fascinated by bodies. Over several summers she accompanied burlesque performers and drag queens for her Polaroid work WIGS & GLOVES, reflecting a queer space that allows freedom beyond binary thinking worlds. With humour, eroticism, irony and tragedy, the performances in Gaes’ pictures are political and queerfeminist – subversive moments showing an incredible diversity.