October 31, 2008 -January 18, 2009
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art

In staging the comprehensive photo exhibition “Inside // Outside” from 31 October 2008 to 18 January 2009, the MKM is embarking on a quest for space. Interiors and perspectives, spaces and spatial boundaries are the major themes which these 16 contemporary artists from German-speaking countries set out to explore. The show is presenting some 70 works from 1990s to the present day by Uta Barth, Laurenz Berges, Thomas Demand, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Thomas Florschuetz, Günther Förg, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Sabine Hornig, Edgar Lissel, Wiebke Loeper, Beatrice Minda, Ricarda Roggan, Hans-Christian Schink, Florian Slotawa and Heidi Specker. The spectrum is highly varied, ranging from small-format wall installations and multipart photoseries to monumental large-scale works measuring up to several metres in size.

Since the advent of photography, representations of space have formed the major themes of the medium, with the translation of three-dimensional space onto the two-dimensional surface posing a special challenge. Visualising space can involve the use of documentary or image-processing techniques, or be charged with emotion. Space is a repository of memory, yet despite the absence of people in almost all the exhibition‘s photographs, there remains a lingering echo or human essence, which relates much about them; for these locations are only vested with a genuine function through human agency. The traces they leave reveal their identity and define the space as a location.