RAY 2021 IDEOLOGIES

The international photography triennial RAY will present outstanding positions in photography and related media for the fourth time, from June 3 to September 12, 2021. This time more than 22 artists will be exhibited at over 11 exhibition venues in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region. The RAY 2021 IDEOLOGIES exhibitions will be taking place at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, the Kunststiftung DZ BANK, the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, the Museum Angewandte Kunst and the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST. For these exhibitions the RAY curatorial team has set the focus on contemporary positions in which the artists reflect on how ideologies have been expressed in the past and in the present, how they work and to what extent they promote power, manipulation, abuse, exclusion and exploitation.

Photography as a medium of representation is especially closely connected in its origin to the imperial industrialization of Western nation states and to the colonization of the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The photographs from this time resound as the expression of a permanently unconscious, but equally manipulatively employed conscious reproduction of myths and negative representations of the continent. It is for this reason that we require other perspectives today, a different form of art practice and other players in the field of photography and associated visual media.

The works comprising photography and film on show at the Museum Angewandte Kunst are concerned, directly or indirectly, with historic abuses as well as the media’s portrayal of “Africa.” Yagazie Emezi, Mohau Modisakeng and Yves Sambu present an exploration from within African societies of gender, poverty, beauty, the body, identity and the consequences of racism for individuals and communities.

Yagazie Emezi (b. 1989, Aba, Nigeria) challenges with her photo series The Beauties of West Point the very idea of beauty that globalization and thus a mostly Western European media defines as the norm. In Consumption of the Black Model, she questions and scrutinizes the ways in which bodies are dramatized by photographers on the one hand, and serve the Western gaze on the other. “How can we, as photographers working in African countries, influence how our histories are consumed by Western media? Who are we creating for?,” are questions Emezi addresses.

Mohau Modisakeng’s (b. 1986, Soweto, South Africa) work is characterised by films, large-scale photographs, installations and performances. The consequences of racism for society and individuals as well as the militarisation and deep division of South Africa are his themes. He interrogates the collective narratives that influence the experience of the world. “I contrast the euphoria associated with the expectation of freedom and the symbolic birth of a new country with the dystopia that reveals itself as soon as the realities of apartheid’s legacy become visible,” says the artist.

Yves Sambu’s (b. 1980, Lukula, Democratic Republic of the Congo) project Vanitas consists of a series of photographs, which deal with “La Sape” and the Congolese “Sapeurs” (dandies): colourful and luxurious, mostly dressed in Western European luxury brands, strolling through the streets of Kinshasa. By having the subjects pose in cemeteries, Sambu creates an artificial pictorial space of being and appearing, far from the places of their actual appearance. For the viewer, his photo series depicts a spiritual and human dimension of the “La Sape” movement as a performative act of self-empowerment.

The thematic concept of RAY 2021 IDEOLOGIES was developed collaboratively by seven curators: Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation), Christina Leber (Art Foundation DZ BANK), Alexandra Lechner (independent curator), Celina Lunsford (Fotografie Forum Frankfurt), Susanne Pfeffer and Anna Sailer (MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST), as well as Matthias Wagner K (Museum Angewandte Kunst).

Press contact: Natali-Lina Pitzer, presse.angewandte-kunst [​at​] stadt-frankfurt.de / T +49 (0)69 212 75339