DARKSIDE — Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed
Curator: Urs Stahel. Main Sponsor: George Foundation
FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR | Gruezenstr. 44-45 | CH-8400 Winterthur
6. September bis 16. November 2008
Groupshow with photographs by Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Joel Peter Witkin, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, Germaine Krull, František Drtikol, Claude Cahun, von Christer Strömholm, Anders Petersen, Ed van der Elsken, Walter Chappell, Peter Hujar, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Urs Lüthi, Jürgen Klauke, Hannah Villiger, von Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Arno Nollen, Paul Armand Gette, Miron Zownir and others
For sexuality and fantasy, photography is a central visual instrument: as document, stimulation, instrument of power, and as a form for artistic creation. Photography shows and stylizes pleasure and passion, voyeurism and self-representation, sexual power and consumption. Fantasies and desires form an exciting pact with photography: sexual fantasies demand representation, actively seek disclosure—and photography uses this power of (pictorial) eroticism for its own ends, to be powerful and seductive. Darkside is dedicated to photographs of ideal, natural, and grotesque bodies; conceives of sexuality as a part of existence; presents photographed sexual practices, desires, and phantasms; discusses sexuality in Surrealism; reflects on reification and fetishization in sexuality; compares voyeurism and exhibitionism with one another; takes up the topics of sexuality and the body within the context of debates around gender, as well as power and the market. Throughout it is always a question of the images we make of “sexuality,” of the endless interflow of fantasies and reality in visual desire over the last one hundred years. With works of 150 photographers.
Publication: „Darkside 1 — Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed“ (German/English). Ed. Urs Stahel, published by Steidl. With texts by Dominique Baqué, Henry Bond, Elisabeth Bronfen, Martin Jaeggi, Urs Stahel, Ulf Erdmann Ziegler and Stefan Zweifel. 344 pages, approx. 250 photographs, format 21.5 x 28 cm, Hardcover. Price: CHF 69.- (coming out in November)
