C/O Berlin presents Daido Moriyama: Retrospective, Jochen Lempert: Lingering Sensations and Farah Al Qasimi: Poltergeist – three photographers who dedicate themselves in different ways to their immediate surroundings – be it the street, nature or the domestic setting.
Over the course of his sixty-year career, Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka) decisively altered how we view photographs. He used his camera to document his immediate surroundings and to visually explore post-war Japanese society. But he also questioned the very nature of photography itself.
Hamburg-based photographer Jochen Lempert tracks nature’s traces. Here, a firefly’s glow has exposed the film, and there, small frogs have hopped across sensitive photo paper as it was exposed, leaving ghostly footprints. Photography’s possibilities for depicting merge with animal traits: the resulting work can be read as artistic variations on biology.
The exhibition of multidisciplinary media artist Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, UAE) comprises photographs and video work. Influenced by the domestic-set horror films of the 1970s and 80s, she tracks the traces of a poltergeist creating mischief within a home. Objects move around of their own volition, spaces feel imbued with psychic energy, and the safety of one’s own home is challenged by the tyranny of its objects. With humor and a light touch, the visual storyteller holds both worlds in balance, as well as the polarities of documentation and fiction, metaphor and the banal.
