30 August – 27 September 2013

Opening: Friday, 30 August

7 pm: conversation with the curator of the exhibition, dr. Matthias Flügge

8 pm: opening reception 

The Entire City (Die Ganze Stadt) project presents six artists and photographers from Germany who look their city from the most diverse points of view. They approach urban culture, the current social and cultural state of their lifeworld, with an individual yet characteristic gaze.

Each of the artists in an idiosyncratic way registers the elements of their reality that made them engage and take notice. In so doing, they record various partial aspects – cityscapes, architecture, portraits, contemporary history, society – at times turning their attention inward to people’s private spheres, at other times looking outward to urban or suburban spaces. They always single out everyday situations, never exceptional or indeed exalted moments. And for precisely this reason, they enable their pictures to tell stories.

At the same time, they see themselves less as documentarists than as artists who are developing their own individual pictorial aesthetic without stage-managing their subject or violating the dignity of those they portray. And yet their works combine artistic quality with an ability to be read on different levels. Along with the information they provide about today’s Germany with their topical pictures, these artist-photographers personify contemporary artistic strategies that use narrative representational structures to create comprehensible access to their imaginary worlds. So they offer not only visual experiences for a diverse audience that is curious and open to new things, but also discussion matter for professional critics and artists.

The exhibition, the first one in a series of exhibitions on art photography in Germany, was conceived by the IFA / Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Curator is dr. Matthias Flügge, an art historian and rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. The exhibition is realised with the support of the Goethe Institut Slovenia.