HEIDELBERGER KUNSTVEREIN
cafeteria:
Ghost | warrior
Joscha Steffens
Opening: Friday, May 16 / 7 p.m.
Exhibition from May 16 until August 3, 2014
How does modern warfare function in times of simulation? Where does the playing end, and where do things start in earnest?
The photographs by Joscha Steffens are no conventional war photographs: they show a game with the game of war, as it occurs on a weekly basis in some out-of-the-way homestead in the Federal Republic.
The photographed warriors are career soldiers or wannabe career soldiers, gathering on weekends for “softair” battles in order to take a digital death, increasingly alienated from them, seriously again in a playful way. The reality of our present-day wars has itself long since transitioned into a war simulation, in which computer freaks stand their ground as today's heroes. By re-simulating the simulative reality of war in analogue war games, these “nerds” express an existential plight, a lack and a need: they have unlearned dying – although, symbolically, they are already dead, the realness of death has been lost to them. They range between these two deaths. They are “Ghostwarriors”.
The exhibition was preceded by the photographic volume "Ghost / Warrior" with the text insert "On the Combative Spirit of Photography" by Florian Arnold – an analysis of the representation of post-modern war in simulation.
Joscha Steffens (born in 1981 in Waiblingen), who grew up in Heidelberg, studied Media art at HFG Karlsruhe from 2003 until 2008 and Visual Arts / Artistic Photography at HGB Leipzig from 2008 until 2011. During studies, a six-month stay at the École Nationale Supérieur de la Photographie in Arles (2006). Scholarship holder of the Study Foundation of the German People. Since Winter Semester 2012 on the postgraduate programme of KHM Cologne.
Aus der Serie "Ghost / Warrior", Joscha Steffens, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014
Irene Sieben zeigt Fotos aus ihrer Zeit in der Wigman Schule, Videostill: Andrea Keiz
Address | Heidelberger Kunstverein | Hauptstr. 97 | D-69117 Heidelberg
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