ART CITIES:Berlin-Julian Röder
With a conceptual-documentary approach, over the last 15 years, the Julian Röder has developed an impressive photographic body of work that addresses questions of global economies and power relations. His works, which have already received considerable international attention, are now presented in Berlin in an extensive survey exhibition for the first time.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Haus am Waldsee Archive
After being trained as a photographer at the Ostkreuz school in Berlin, Julian Röder studied photography with Timm Rautert at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. His photographic series focus on the subtle changes of our globalised present. Julian Röder in his solo exhibition “Right and Space” at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin presents a selection from four series of works which are central to his multiple photographic practice since 2001. Power relations and marketing gestures are the main content of these series. At the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 Röder was still among the protesters. Yet he became more and more aware that he could only find relevant, cogent photographs from the standpoint of a more detached onlooker. He attempted to encircle with the camera what was actually the subject of the criticism. It turned out that the protests increasingly failed to lead anywhere. In the rural isolation of Heiligendamm and Hokkaido they finally congealed into sheer gestures, which, while having a global media audience, achieved next to no discernible political effect, Röder has captured these developments in the series “The Summits” (2001-08). For his series “Human Resources” (2007-09) Röder has taken clandestine shots of professional buyers and sellers at consumer fairs. In order to shift the focus within the habitat of a “trade fair” to the body language of the participants he deleted from his photographs all names and logos that are ubiquitous at such events. Thus he uncovered postures screaming of artificiality and media-conformity that have long since entered most people’s body language. On the stage of the trade fair the observed have become accessories of a world of interchangeable commodities and marketing. On 2011 Röder shoot the series “Word of Warfare” at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference, IDEX, in Abu Dhabi. The images have been consciously exaggerated to underscore the absurdity of a military consumption pageant in the Arabian desert, where military and power come extremely close. For the series “Mission and Task” (2012-13), Röder worked with the means of advertising photography, by using artificial light in the open, to reveal the secret infrastructure of Europe’s external borders as the rampart of our wealth. Harmless surfaces, such as Zeppelin aircrafts, chapels, fences or satellites, conceal high-tech surveillance systems monitoring and appraising everyone and everything by air, land, water or from space.
Info: Haus am Waldsee, Argentinische Allee 30, Berlin, Duration: 18/11/16-12/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00,18:00, www.hausamwaldsee.de
