EIGEN MODERN
Anyone familiar with the work of Valentina Seidel and Joachim Brohm will immediately recognize the interplay between the two in the exhibition title EIGEN MODERN. Valentina Seidel, for instance, has created a photographic project titled Eigen Brot (“Own Bread”), dedicated to society’s outsiders, while Joachim Brohm, in several photo series and books, has explored the architecture of Classical Modernism – for example, the afterlife of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings.
In this exhibition, both strands are interwoven: Seidel’s photographs of outsiders are shown alongside Brohm’s images of modernist architecture. Yet, there is also a third element. The two artists have invited an outsider, Michael Pleißner (†2025), as a guest artist. He contributes a series of dream houses – both architectural models and sculptures – whose
intricate, ornamental forms stand in striking contrast to the purity ideals of Classical Modernist architecture.
And yet, both belong equally to the idea of modernity. For modernity, in its very structure, is dialectical: the more radically it manifests the rational and the reduced, the more urgently it requires a counterpole of the wild and chaotic. It is only by defining outsiders that something else can be declared the norm. One cannot exist without the other, and the dynamic, the progress of modernity itself, derives precisely from its ability to integrate resistance to itself from the very beginning. This may even constitute its particular distinction from other epochs. Thus, the title EIGEN MODERN can also be read as suggesting that the exhibition, through its exemplary works, allows us to trace this distinctive self-relation of modernity – and, in doing so, to understand it more deeply.
No medium fits this theme better than photography. Photography is THE medium of modernity: on the one hand, considered as objective and cool as the ,form follows function´ paradigm; on the other, its technical conditions have constantly provoked experimentation and contradiction. The history of photography is therefore also a history of diverse
outbursts and technical explorations. In EIGEN MODERN, this becomes visible through the combination of various important modes of photography – from black and white to inverted images – brought together in one exhibition.
Wolfgang Ullrich, 2025
