Limitierte Entblößung, 1996

Art Cologne

This photo series is composed of images from sex contact magazines from the 1990s by means of fluoroscopy. The private photos published there, which show selected body parts and sections, mostly without the faces of the people depicted, were appropriated and superimposed to form large-format collages. The pictorial discussion about privacy, publicity, shame, desire and communication has been presented twice in public to date: in 1997 at the Art Cologne as an expansive installation, and a short time later in the Stadthausgalerie Münster. There, the work was also adapted to the specific location. In addition to the photo installation in the exhibition space, motifs from the sex magazines were displayed as miniatures in the lockers of the public cloakroom of the city museum, where they could be ‘discovered’ unprepared. The reaction of the museum visitors to these unexpected images was recorded by a video surveillance camera. The recordings of visitors' reactions were to be shown at the finissage, but this had to be cancelled for image rights reasons.