EXHIBITION BOSCO GAUTING
Vernissage: 20. October 2020
Photos: ©Mirja Kofler
Tuesday 20. Oct 2020 – 16. Dec 2020
Vernissage Tue 20.10.2020 from 19:00
Artist Talks Start on the hour
Sa 21.11.2020 between 14:00 and 18:00 o’clock
Wed 16.12.2020 between 17:00 and 21:00 o’clock
Podium discussion ‘sustainable travel’
So 08.11.2020 at 15:00 o’clock
further dates by arrangement
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Being and outdoor and landscape photographer I often find myself struggling with the consequences of my actions. Not only do I and my team travel areas and landscapes that would be better off without us. But also the pictures I take make people want to go out and search for adventure and beautiful, untouched nature. I can’t just say: ‘This is a sensitive planet, nature needs to be protected, better you don‘t go there – but Hey, look how stunningly Beautiful it is!’ That is why I question myself and how I can justify MY actions to give a meaning to my work, that goes beyond the obvious. In the summer of 2019, I have launched the long term project
THIS IS NOT TO BE SEEN *by future generations
With that project, I plan on documenting climate change and the influence it has on the people living in remote and rural areas. I like to think it‘s similar to a Polar bear in the zoo. We don‘t want it to be there, but it kind of serves a greater purpose: we need the combined power of emotions and knowledge to get out of our comfort zone and to the point, where we want to make a change. I hope my pictures start a conversation that – at some point – leads to action. It’s in our hands!
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
That’s what the Brundtland Report said back in 1987. Travel – especially air travel – has a not inconsiderable impact on climate change due to its emissions. And even beyond that, travel can have a significant impact on nature. The world is getting ‘smaller’, travel is becoming cheaper and places that were inaccessible and undeveloped not so long ago can suddenly be left behind on a weekend trip. Travel has become a status symbol of our generation and a matter of course. The consequences this has for the environment and also for the social structures in places that have suddenly become tourist hotspots cannot yet be fully foreseen. This creates a moral conflict, especially for people who are professionally involved in travel and tourism, as their actions encourage people to travel and thus endanger the landscapes and natural treasures they actually want to preserve. Accompanying the current photo exhibition, outdoor and adventure photographer Jana Erb (KontraPixel), travel expert Ovid Jacota and rehab republic activist Laura Zwick discuss whether it is possible to reconcile a sustainable lifestyle with the desire to travel. The central question here is: How can travel be designed in such a way that it has the least possible impact on future generations and our environment?
Panelists:
Jana Erb – photographer
Ovid Jacota – expert for sustainable travel
Laura Zwick – rehab republic (www.rehab-republic.de)
Moderation:
Constantin Veitl
for further information and preorder of the (free) tickets visit the website of Bosco Gauting
ART CRITICISM BY KATJA SEBALD
Awaken emotions and create awareness. Because we could change something. Each individual could change his behavior. With her project “This is not to be seen* by future generations”, photographer Jana Erb sees herself as a chronicler of climate change. Her landscape photographs from Iceland are so spectacularly beautiful that – despite or perhaps because of the exhibition title – one inevitably wants to see with one’s own eyes what she has seen. Quick, before it is too late. At the same time, every traveler and everyone who stomps through the vulnerable and wild landscape of the island in the North Atlantic means that the threatened nature will be destroyed even faster and even further.
“The world is beautiful,” cries every single photograph by Jana Erb. “The world is beautiful” was also the title of an illustrated book with one hundred photographs by Albert Renger-Patzsch, which caused an enormous sensation when it was opened in 1928. Thomas Mann wrote about the photographer that he had “looked at, isolated, elevated, intensified, made significant, animated the individual, the lenses, out of the tide of the world of appearances. Many other prominent contemporaries let themselves be carried away to hymnic commentaries, they celebrated the “myth of objectivity” and “realism”, i.e. the incorruptibility of photography. They believed that the beauty of things, which is visible in Renger-Patzsch’s pictures, was proof of their belonging to creation – at that time, of course, including technology as the creation of man.
We, almost one hundred years later, have of course long known that photographs are anything but objective representations of reality. We know that pictures are manipulated and that they manipulate us. And last but not least, we know that photography is more suitable than any other medium for generating emotions. And this is precisely the dilemma in which outdoor photographer Jana Erb finds herself: With every new report for a mountaineering magazine and with every new advertising photo for outdoor equipment, she arouses emotions. But these emotions are above all wishes and desires. And yet these images are necessary to create an awareness of nature that is worth preserving. We need photographers who show us how beautiful our world is. Just as we need the polar bear in the zoo to help protect the polar bears, Jana Erb would say.
Her nature photographs, taken on two trips to Iceland in 2018 and 2019, are therefore highly political. And yet they deserve to be recognized as spectacularly beautiful images. The photographer usually discovered her motifs just a few meters off the usual tourist routes – simply by changing perspective. With the help of a drone, she photographed rivers and lakes in which cold and warm water mix and, together with mineral rocks and sediments, create contrasts, streaks and color explosions whose intensity is reminiscent of abstract paintings by Bernd Zimmer. From a bird’s eye view, other landscapes appear as hyperreal as if they were illuminated from within. Waterfalls, rock formations, icebergs and rainbows – in the paintings of Jana Erb the world is so beautiful, so “elevated, intensified, made meaningful, animated”, to speak to Thomas Mann, that one would like to cry.
Katja Sebald, 21.10.2020
Directly after the event, professional cultural journalists* write an independent review of each Theaterforum event. This criticism contains exclusively the opinion of the authors.
INTERVIEW WITH BAYERISCHER RUNDFUNK
about my project and the exhibtion
The exhibition is accompanied by the new calendars and the photo magazine ICELAND – ISSUE NO I
