Sabrina Jung : Behind the Billboard, MK Galerie, Berlin

Behind the billboard
On the mutual correlation of image and identity
curated by Caroline von Courten

Kim Bouvy
Sonia Jimenez Alvarez
Sabrina Jung
Dieuwertje Komen
Anne Lass
Patricia Neligan
Antje Peters
Elian Somers

13. Nov - 18. Dez 2010
Opening: 12.11. / 18 Uhr

MK Galerie,
Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26,
Berlin

Just as architecture shapes a city's identity, photography plays an equally crucial role in expressing our personal identities and communicating these to the outside world.

The exhibition Behind the Billboard centres on the correlation between the conceptual identity of a city, society or individual and its actual visual manifestation. To do so, the exhibit takes its inspiration from the Dutch concept of Maakbaarheid (the 'makeable' or 'feasible' society), a political theory originating in the 1960s and 1970s which held that all aspects of society could be influenced by strategic engineering. In the past few years, this principle has once again become the subject of discussion, but with one important change: it is now being applied to the level of the individual in order to debate the malleability of human beings and the attainability of happiness.

A photograph represents, in essence, a suspension of movement. Embodying individual moments frozen in time, the works on display challenge us to discover what lies beyond the seemingly intact photographic facade. More than that, they examine various subjects that relate, each in their own way, to the issue of identity and how it is constructed.

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Sabrina Jung (D, 1978) used portraits found at various photo studios to create her photo collages entitled Masken [Masks] (2009-2010). As former tokens of personal identity, these photographs have become relics of a time gone by. Thanks to a simple yet radical alteration, the images' dominant social roles are now exposed, emphasised or subverted. Thus the concept of individual identity is shown to be a staged performance of various social clichés – a particularly sobering thought in view of the public displays of identity (e.g. profile photos) on social networking sites.

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