DFA – “Radikal” group exhibition @ OFF//FOTO Festival – Mannheim (Germany)
It is a great honor to have been invited to exhibit together with 28 of my fellow members of the DFA (Deutsche Fotografische Akademie – German Photographic Academy) at the OFF//FOTO Festival in Mannheim, Germany. Our group show has the title “Radikal”.
I am showing 3 photos during the time of the global construction boom and bust and have given this grouping the title “Perseverance”, in German – “Durchhaltevermögen”. One photo is from Shanghai, China where old neighborhoods were being demolished and many people of humble means were being displaced to the city’s edge to make way for luxury apartment towers. Although I did not not speak with him, it looks as if the man depicted has the perseverance to perhaps continue to try to live in and even enjoy his old home and reading his book as long as he can while everything else around him has already been demolished. Just as he is fighting for his survival, so are the colonizing species of plants or “weeds”, depicted in the other two images, one from Maricopa, Arizona (USA) and the other form Las Vegas (USA), both areas that underwent a construction boom and bust.
It is a competition for survival, between the developers’ bulldozers and the land’s inhabitants – flora and fauna (including humans), between profit and nature. Who will have the most perseverance? Could this be seen as a form of “radical” defiance against economic forces?
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> Many thanks to one of my favorite labs and printers in the world, Stefan of FotoCompany Altona in Hamburg, Germany for having printed my photos and having mounted them on Aluminum dibond. I have been collaborating with this lab for over a decade now.
> Many thanks also to the Avery Foundation China Travel Grant for having funded my voyage to China, where my main focus was on studying the Chinese Railway system. See my project “Chinese Trains”.
> Exhibition photos by Wolfgang Zurborn. Lab photos by Stefan.
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OFF//FOTO Festival – April 24-May 25, 2025
Atelier Haus Altes Güteramt
Güterhallenstraße 18A
68159 Mannheim
Germany
Exhibition opening on April 25, 2025 at 19:00.