SETAREH X is excited to announce Consequences, an upcoming exhibition of Johannes Raimann and Fynn Ribbeck. Consequences features two artists who engage with photography as a dispositif and examine its technological-material conditions and political implications (Raimann), as well as its role as a reservoir of collective memory and the question of the (un)biased innocence of images(Ribbeck). Part of the conceptual history revolves around the promise of photography as a trace of truth: Due to the inherent act of directly transmissioning the physical, it seems to testify a piece of reality, a quality that has been described as photography‘s transparency.

In the diametrically opposite direction are the works of Johannes Raimann, which look into the interior of the camera, intensively highlighting the opacity of the material components, through its own gaze. Sensor of Impact is the result of the sensor of a cellphone camera making one image out of ca. 480 individual shots in a meticulous process, blowing up the subject of the image to a size that both melds and confuses the familiar and the unfamiliar. We are rarely aware of the complex technologies and idelogical implications embedded in the tools, instruments for our everyday, that guide our perception of the world, in which various mechanisms of control and normalization create a network of sightlines. In the shattered surface of Sensor of Impact, physical and biopoliticalpower collide.

Remarkably, the shot combines two different topoi of seeing and, in this way, links the visual with the tactile. The rectangular outline can thus be understood as a view from a window – and thereby refer to the tradition of panel painting – as well as a topographical view from a bird‘s-eye perspective.Raimann‘s approach is akin to an archeological one, uncovering layer by layer the underlying materialities of technological sediments.

The same tectonic structure can be found in the work camera module iphone 11 pro, which reproduces a photographic frame. The rectangular parts represent sensors coated with iridescent foil, whose color effect depends on the respective point of view. This effect, which in itself is not reproducible, questions the claim to objectivity in photography at arguably the most central point.