Barbara Proschak / Bewegte Ordnung. Vom Bedürfnis der Motive
The Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden presents Bewegte Ordnung. Vom Bedürfnis der Motive, the first comprehensive solo exhibition by Barbara Proschak (*1984) in Germany. The exhibition provides an insight into her artistic work over the last fifteen years and also shows new works that are on public display for the first time.
Barbara Proschak is one of the most independent voices in contemporary photography. She understands photography not as a finished single image, but as an open space for thought and research. Collecting, organizing, and rearranging form the core of her practice: thousands of photographic notes give rise to dense constellations of images in which bodies, nature, studio, object, and pictorial space enter into relationship with one another. Proschak combines photography with drawing, glass, object arrangements, and natural history presentation forms.
Proschak's process-oriented working method is at the center of the exhibition. Her images are layered, covered, shifted, drawn over, and recombined. In display cases, picture boxes, and edited photographs, a conscious interplay between visibility and invisibility unfolds. Meaning does not arise in the single image, but in relationships, interstices, and empty spaces. Thus, the exhibition shows photography as something mobile, changeable, and physical. What we see is an open image system that questions our perception as well as our everyday use of images.
The Sovereignty of Seeing in the Age of Digital Image Production
In an era when images circulate en masse on social media and are increasingly generated by algorithmic systems, the question of the sovereignty of seeing takes on new urgency. Today, images are created at breakneck speed, shared countless times, altered, and recontextualized. It often remains unclear who produced them, under what conditions they were created, or to what extent they have already been edited. Images increasingly appear as the results of complex, sometimes opaque processes.
Against this backdrop, artistic positions that address the very conditions of image production and perception are gaining significance. Barbara Proschak’s works examine photography not primarily as a means of representing reality, but rather focus on the conditions of its creation.
By revealing these processes, Proschak shifts the focus from the finished image to its genesis. The strength of her artistic approach lies in the fact that she frees photography from the burden of mere “representation” and conceives of it as a laboratory of seeing. The exhibition invites us to look more closely, to adopt different perspectives, and to see ourselves as responsible observers.
Curator: Lotte Dinse, Director, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden
