Exhibition Portraits

Fragments of Urban Identities,
Deutsch

Berlin is a magnet for young people from all over the world, a city shaped by diverse languages, cultural backgrounds, aspirations, and personal fresh starts. Many come to this city in search of artistic freedom, a sense of belonging, anonymity, or the chance to become someone new. “Mirrors of Berlin – Fragments of Urban Identities” is an ongoing photographic and audiovisual portrait project by the Berlin-based filmmaker and photographer Owe Sigmund Tautenhahn. His perspective extends across generations, and it is exclusively women who, with their biographies, are brought together in this exhibition to form a contemporary urban history and portrait of the city at the same time. The work currently comprises more than 70 life-sized large-scale portraits and is conceived as an evolving body of work that will ultimately include 100 portraits of women living in Berlin. The project is combined with fragmented video image projections and spatial sound-noise compositions recorded in Berlin during both day and night. Together, both elements create a fragmented emotional map of the inner life of the city everyone talks about and many wish to be part of. The women shown are not representatives, but rather speak of fleeting moments that here become documents of the present. In this work, Tautenhahn brings the storytellers into his studio and consciously refrains from, or removes them from, their contextual background. What remains for the viewer are only clues such as gestures, facial expressions, and body posture. In this way, an intense observation is initially demanded from the viewer in order to discover something about the portrayed women and their city. In contrast to the stillness of the portraits, the video installations add a second layer: blurred passers-by, fragmented urban movement, disappearing silhouettes, fleeting fragments of conversations, and alienated nocturnal metropolitan sounds pass through the visual and acoustic space at the site of projection. The city no longer appears as a fixed place, but as a condition and perception. The chosen large-scale format of the photographs is not only of special significance for the framing, posture, and behaviour of the portrayed subjects, but also for our own search to read the image and learn as much as possible. In this way, we are confronted not only with social perception, but also with very personal and publicly displayed self-confidence. Beyond the accidental snapshot, Owe S. Tautenhahn succeeds, through his photographic gaze, in creating a tangible relationship between the viewer and the portrayed women, granting them a certain dignity and respect through the larger-than-life scale of the images. Through his portraits and installations, he searches within the women and the city for influences of environment and origin, while simultaneously exploring traces of people within the urban landscape of Berlin, perhaps also embarking on his own personal search. For this reason, “Mirrors of Berlin” is not intended as a sociological portrait of the city, but rather as an emotional and visual exploration of Berlin and of what we read within the women. ( curator )