Hopstreet

Hopstreet brings together the work of Katrin Kamrau and Benjamin Verhoeven for the first time.

Katrin Kamrau finds inspiration in the technical working process of photography. She focuses on the traces, forms and inscriptions that a photographic setting leaves in our minds. Without the outcome produced by a photographic shot Kamrau invites us to consider the invisible process of photographic media.

She completes our exploration with her own reflection on the photographic medium developed in her latest series: Spektrum. A spectrum is literally: “the distribution of a characteristic of a physical system of phenomenon”. This ample definition takes us in the realm of photography; Kamrau plays the role of a physician and analyzes the different aspects that describe both the essence of photography and its configuration, form and process. Kamrau exemplifies a tendency in contemporary art, concerned with photography’s material and structural qualities. She shows the contemporary form of the medium, where software and lens – analogue and digital technologies - work together. The result is a series of tools as form; black and white surfaces, a backstage, supplies, color tests and screenshots. The alchemic fiction is staged, but there are no actors in this play because the one and only protagonist is photography.

There is a latent desire and sensuousness in Kamrau’s pictures, if her approach seems analytical, the result is never cold and removed. Photography is naked, its secrets are revealed in front of our eyes and we look at photography’s “overexposure”, but focusing on the complexity and the meaning of the medium.

Each installation by Benjamin Verhoeven comprises the medium of film. He always begins by using an (analogous)  image. Based on this, he develops various situations in which he  plays bath with the presence and absence of the viewer by filming him/her and then playing it back. By exaggerating the 'shortcomings' that occur within the medium of the digital image, the viewer is confronted with an image of himself/ herself as well as with the question of the digital image itself. In this way there is room for the artist to manipulate the image and to assimilate the analogue image into the digital one.