ZEITLOSIGKEIT is an exhibition that brings together a collection of recent and archive images by German photographer Katja Rahlwes. She describes this work as a photographic essay on notions that relate to ambiguity and contradictions that balance or destabilize everyday life. Katja Rahlwes states that in reality everything influences, from feminine strength, transcendence, consumerism, life and death…

This exhibition is the result of existential considerations, on the timelessness of the confusion of the senses… Portraits, still lifes and some self-portraits too, it is also a kind of diary whose pages would always be in a process of fabrication.

Portraits and images of women are what we know best about Katja Rahlew, her portraits of icons on the pages of international fashion magazines from Vogue France, Self Service, Fantasticman, Purple Fashion, The Gentlewoman, to advertising campaigns for brands such as Céline, Miu Miu, Vionnet, Gucci, etc.

Here she delivers another angle of her work, it is a set of images that are often taken in an intimate context, without attitude and devoid of protocols. She likes to alternately highlight smoothed feelings, an inner feminine strength, but also repressed or even annihilated sensations, a sensitive work that is linked to memory.

Here, we are faced with a balancing and playful assembly of elements, of trivial and exquisite things, a kind of ex-votos of the contemporary, numerous references to symbolic objects of popular culture and other objects that have survived her childhood.

Personal images of female connivance and still lifes that result in a pivotal exhibition where we can see simultaneously the two parts that form her universe: the public and private domains, the aesthetics of her own resistance.

Paris, October 2016
Géraldine Postel

ZEITLOSIGKEIT is an exhibition that brings together a collection of recent and archive images.