PHOTO:Fiona Tan-GAAF
The central exhibition program of this year’s Photoszene-Festival is entitled “Artist Meets Archive”, with which the significant diversity and quality of photography in Cologne’s Collections and archives are made visible through exchange with international artists. They have devoted themselves to the extensive collections of six museums and institutions, and now present the results of their research in six exciting exhibitions!
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Ludwig Museum Archive
International artists discover archives in Cologne: this is the idea behind the Internationale Photoszene Köln 2019 festival’s program “Artist Meets Archive”. As cooperating partners, six institutions* each invited an artist to develop a project based on their collection. The Museum Ludwig invited the artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan to realize an exhibition project with the Museum’s Photography Collection as the starting point. Fiona Tan’s work revolves around questions of time, identity and memory. The archive as a time capsule has played a role in her artistic strategies of research and classificationin previous projects. “Fiona Tan. GAAF” takes as its starting point the Agfacolor advertisement archive that consists of several thousand 6×6 color negatives and photographs which were taken between 1952 and 1968. This archive served Agfa as a stock for advertisements, brochures, exhibitions, and the magazine “Agfa Photoblätter”. After discovering this almost forgotten and uncatalogued archive in the Museum Ludwig, Tan became interested in the inherent paradox of its images: staged and idealized scenes of models posing for professional photographers, nonetheless intended to appear spontaneous and authentic, as if taken by amateurs. “These images cause me to reflect upon the pose, upon artificiality versus spontaneity and authenticity” says Tan who brings these images into public view for the first time. The Dutch word “gaaf” (an anagram of Agfa) means “neat” or “perfect”. In this exhibition Fiona Tan focuses upon the image and the role of women as portrayed in these photographs, drawing attention to the ideal as opposed to the reality of these formative decades in postwar Germany. Juxtaposing fantasy with reality, professional with vernacular, color with black & white, Tan confronts this advertising archive with documentary photographs of the same era from the Museum Ludwig Collection and with a small selection of her own works dealing with portraiture. “Vox Populi London” embodies an informal snapshot, a playful group portrait of a city. In “Linnaeus’ Flower Clock” Tan reflects upon the nature of time itself. Intentionally blurring the divisions between film and photography, the six part installation “Provenance” questions if it is possible to look at a film in the same way as a painted portrait.
* Apart from the Museum Ludwig, the other institutions are: the Museum of the City of Cologne, the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, the Rheinische Bildarchiv, and the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
Info: Curator: Fiona Tan, Ludwig Museum, Heinrich-Böll-Platz, Cologne, Duration: 4/5-11/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-ludwig.de
