Flesh & Bone
2024Birgit Dieker and Jürgen Baumann
Double Exhibition
10.02.- 05.05.2024
ZAK - Centre for Contemporary Art
The human body as an object of media staging, political appropriation and projection site of collective attributions, but also as a topic of human aestheticization is the focus of the works of Berlin artists Jürgen Baumann and Birgit Dieker. In a jointly developed exhibition concept, they juxtapose sculptural and photographic groups of works in a dialogical manner, thus creating an artistic space for the complex discussion of body-specific aspects of the present.
Birgit Dieker (* 1969) works as a sculptor and uses various materials such as textiles and leather, as well as everyday objects, to create objects analogous to the body, which are in turn deconstructed through sometimes seemingly martial interventions and applications. The predominantly female body becomes the scene of fragmentation, it is alienated and experiences numerous aggregate states of metamorphosis. These signal both collective access and a view into the inner constitution.
Jürgen Baumann’s (* 1958) large-format photographic tableaus focus on the surfaces of bodies and take significant details and internal structures as an occasion for artistic investigations.
Contrary to contemporary medialization, he scans bodies in detail with the camera and develops largely abstracted spaces and aesthetic “landscapes” from these fragmentations, which construct new visual realities beyond the representational.