FREE ENTRY
WEDNESDAY - SUNDAY
14 p.m. - 18:30 p.m.
Exhibition supported by the DRAC Grand Est, the Grand Est Region and the City of Strasbourg.
Enigmatic, disturbing, disturbing, ghostly, dark. The photographs of the series Half Life bring together unpublished images of Michael Ackerman captured in Paris, Berlin, New York, Krakow and even Havana. The exhibition is the result of a project started in 2001 in which here appear inconsistent forms, imprecise bodies and faces, there nebulous views and diffuse lights. The black and white photographs with fragmented grain come from a blurry, obscure and unreal universe. Exacerbated and free from any narrative intention, the works of Michael Ackerman retain decisive, violent and intense moments. A pledge of the photographer's penetrating and instinctive gaze, witness to moving encounters and striking moments, Half Life defines a fictional space out of time and reveals the anguished image of an interior world.
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A naked woman, her arms around her, her hands on her stomach. Frozen, she looks up, surprised, astonished. In his gaze, an inevitable expression: love, fear or sadness? Naked, the man is kneeling on a bed. A posture of supplication, a strange position. A vague entity that disappears behind a screen of stripes and a feeling of suffering that emerges from it. In a corner, an old man seated at a table, a cigarette in his hand. Curls of white smoke, a drink, a need, a loneliness. Two shaved heads, the portrait of the artist and that of a woman. A curious osmosis and its disturbing reflection. And landscapes. Snow-capped, lost, dark and silent. A balanced sweetness, a faith in beauty perceptible in these photographs of such a brutal world.
Far from the constraints of the traditional documentary mode, the photographs impose themselves as a unified personal journey. At the extreme limit of contrasts and lights, with maximum risk taking and grazing the failed image, Michael Ackerman plays with photographic accidents and intensifies them: air blur, immaterial shake, intensified grain, saturated blacks and whites, framing and diverse formats. Everything contributes to the hallucinatory representation of an unveiled and hidden world where documentaries, fiction and autobiography mingle.
Each image is an unforeseen, intuitive and instant encounter. The places and the people do not matter, the before and after moments captured. It's all just anecdotal. The result is a vision of the world imbued with melancholy and hope where the image of disappearance and erasure dominates. Beyond what is shown, the photographer restores the depth of an emotion linked to his point of view and to reality. In this singular dialogue, no judgment. Michael Ackerman illustrates the secrets of unknowns, creates heavy silences and compresses time in tormented atmospheres.
Barbara hyvert
Michael ackerman was born in 1967 in Tel Aviv. He is American but now lives in Berlin. He is represented by Galerie VU '. His series Half Life was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center Régional d'Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon in Sète in May 2010 and was screened during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles in 2009. His work was exhibited this year at the RIPs in Arles as part of the exhibition from the Marin Karmitz collection.
In 2009, he also won the SCAM Roger Pic award for the Departure, Poland portfolio. Michael has exhibited in several art centers in Poland, at the Fotografi e Am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin in 2006, at the Caprice Horn Gallery in Berlin, at the Museum of Photography in The Hague in 2004. In 1999, 2001 and 2004, the Galerie VU 'dedicates three personal exhibitions to him for his series End Time City et Half Life. Michael won the Nadar Prize for his book End Time City as well as the Infi nity Award for Young Photographer in 1998. His photographic work has resulted in three editions: Half Life, to be published in October by Editions Delpire, the work Fiction published by Delpire in 2001 and End Time City, published by Nathan / Delpire in 1999.