in THE GÄLLERY – Raum für Fotografie
The Documentary Photography Awards of the Wüstenrot Foundation are the most important awards of their kind in Germany. Together with the Photographic Collection of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, they have been presented every two years since 1994 including works of young artists from German universities and academies who use contemporary documentary image strategies and forms of representation to question the present.
In the 15th edition of the awards, Nazanin Hafez (*1991), Kristina Lenz (*1992) & Alex Simon Klug (*1991), Malte Uchtmann (*1996) and Hannah Wolf (*1988) are honored. The artists engage in different ways with existing ‘truths’ about the world that affect society and the individual. The documentary strategies and forms used here range from documentary-fictional to AI-generated visual worlds. These are technics that move along the edges of the documentary, touching and oscillating with it, without being documentary photographs in the conventional sense.
Nazanin Hafez
In her multimedia work “Spectators”, Nazanin Hafez processes “found footage” from Iranian and international press media and social media, recorded at public execution sites in Iran, into paper collages. Hafez critically questions the moral responsibility and involvement of spectators and how these places can be depicted without reproducing violence.
Kristina Lenz & Alex Simon Klug
The influence that synthetically generated images have on our present is demonstrated in the video installation “your choices should be grounded in reality” by Kristina Lenz & Alex Simon Klug. With an archaeological approach, they document the rapid development stages of AI diffusion models using the prompt ‘close-up speaking mouth’. The aim is to create a real archive that records phenomena and ephemera.
Malte Uchtmann
Malte Uchtmann explores how systems of knowledge, order and representation influence our perception and behavior in “ANT*HOLOGY: De/Bugging the cultural history of ants”, a spacious two-channel video sound installation. The cultural history of ants becomes the starting point for an examination of human social structures.
Hannah Wolf
In the two-channel video projection “Die Dialektik dieser Arbeit” (The Dialectic of this Work), Hannah Wolf deals with the arms industry in Germany. The focus is on the architecture of anonymous functional buildings that seem to blend almost perfectly into cities and suburbs. The ‘everyday nature of the extraordinary’ comes to the fore here and calls for critical examination.
Credit: Kristina Lenz & Alex Simon Klug, Videostill aus »read my lips«, Teil der Arbeit »your choices should be grounded in reality«, 2025, Videoinstallation ca. 15 Minuten, © Kristina Lenz & Alex Simon Klug
In cooperation with
