Erasing the past, tailoring a new identity, becoming somebody else; not just anyone, but a Rockefeller. The old, long buried self used to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter from Bavaria. But he vanished a long time ago in a journey from Germany to the States. His initials were lost in a series of taken names; his skin appropriated a handful of aliases, all grandiose and luxurious in lifestyle. In 2008, after three decades of spurious identities, the lie collapsed and with it the man. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, aka Christopher Crowe, Clark Rockefeller to name but a few; to many a swindler, a con man, a crook; to others, a gifted storyteller, a man with a polished accent who dared to be whatever he wished.

Sara-Lena Maierhofer discovered Clark in a newspaper article in 2008. She became fascinated by the man with multiple skins and decided to approach him. After Clark refused to meet her, she decided to study him from a distance; to conduct her own criminal investigation based on the existing pieces of forensic evidence- the bits of newspaper, pictures, even Clark’s early childhood drawings, and her letters to him. Still Maierhofer needed to go further. In an attempt to penetrate the multiple layers of his lie and reach the core of his personality, she chose to approach him through fiction, following Clark’s lead. She imagined him in a world of clones and doubles, one where the borders of truth and lie collapse against the rigid confinements of the image.

Der Beitrag Dear Clark, erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Collected by Julian Faulhaber during several years he spent working in and amongst these shoots, the photographs of Catalogue reveal the world behind the perfect images we encounter on our screens and in glossy magazines.

Like a powerful advert Catalogue promises meaning: an answer, a solution, a way to sate human desires. But unlike an advert, that meaning is never quite revealed. It is always just out of reach, a turn of the page away, or just out of shot.

Der Beitrag Catalogue erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Masse opens with an image revealing a set of shiny bronze doors. The eye is drawn to a black box angled above its entrance. What does it see? And who is watching? Though the questions remain unanswered, the tone is set for the following pages, which reveal Gessner’s artistic dexterity as he moves seamlessly from hyper-stylised shots of hardware to classic architectural photos, collaged Fitbits, smudged impressions tracing the movement of fingerprints on a screen, and cropped streetscapes in Berlin, Seoul, and New York. Rooftop satellites, radio towers and CCTV cameras are extracted from their surroundings and examined in a detached, exacting style.

Scattered throughout, a series of six abstract works depicts shards of a circuit board splintering into ever smaller fragments – as traces of the surveillance society come into focus, so too does the digital copy of the self become increasingly nuanced. Across Gessner’s works, the restrained seduction of his visual language, executed with unfaltering precision, contrasts starkly with the complexity of the subject his camera examines. Lured into a conceptual panopticon, the viewer looks in from the edge and gazes out from the centre of the mass; at once the observer and the observed.

Der Beitrag Masse erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.