Tatjana Vall (b. 1994 in Sombor, SRB, lives and works in Munich and Berlin) questions the conventional perception of authenticity and attempts to uncover the subtle irregularities of physical reality. Drawing on natural science, psychology and art history, she creates mechanical sculptures, ecosystemic installations and mixed-media works to explore the interdependencies between humans, nature and technology.
In her most recent works, Tatjana Vall engages with photography and its inherent technical and perceptual promises of memory and time. The works allow different temporal dimensions to flow into one another, in which technology-driven uncertainties and potentials of the present converge with historical questions regarding the technical gaze. Multi-layered pigment prints on aluminum plates evoke the materiality of the daguerreotype, yet in Vall’s image production, surfaces are digitally simulated. The basis consists of motifs generated from found images and manually edited. Suggested landscapes, natural phenomena, or shadows of invented apparatuses challenge established expectations of photographic imaging processes. At the same time, they symbolize photography’s progressive, often quasi-scientific drive to continually test new techniques. An appropriation through imitation that Vall consistently pursues in her work. The visible interferences—double exposures, cross-fades, stamp patterns, irregularities, and blurriness—ask less about what an image depicts and more about what an image produces—how it is loaded, rendered, or printed. The works are mounted in aluminum profiles, standardized system components that remain recognizable as industrial standard parts. This simultaneity of disclosure and auratization permeates the artist’s entire working method.

Enya Burger (b. 1996 in Düsseldorf, lives and works in Düsseldorf) combines installation, sculpture, video, photography, and drawing to address themes from biology, mythology, and society, engaging intensively with power structures in politics, the economy, and the digital sphere. She examines the underlying structures of digital technology production as well as the social and gender-specific norms that inform the programming of everyday products.
The wall works on display explore the extent to which visibility and representation depend on apparatus and are shaped by technical, material, and physical conditions. The series “Terrain Study” combines a microscopic image of a body surface with a manipulated aerial landscape photograph. A magnifying glass functions as an optical and spatial threshold. The result is a composite visual field in which proximity and overview, surface and terrain, body and landscape shift into one another. The works of the series “turning close-apart” combine two opposing modes of seeing on a mirrored surface. On the front is a UV print of a microscopic image of human material—on the back, a laser engraving of a technical drawing of a telescope. Microscopic close-up and telescopic long-distance views intertwine, creating an image structure in which examination, projection, and self-perception overlap. The title of the aluminum sculptures, “Drill Baby Drill,” references the provocative slogan of the U.S. Republican Party, which stands for an aggressive extraction policy, particularly regarding fracking. Burger expands on the power motif of the drill by combining it with the symbolism of the suit belt, which embodies the dominance of a (mostly male) decision-maker, and examines how closely aesthetics, power, and capitalization are intertwined.