What potential lies in our constantly changing approach of photography? What opportunities do the new formats of visual communication offer? How can documentary methods be combined with interventions in the image? Or, more generally: What characterizes contemporary artistic photography? These are the central questions of the exhibition series with/against the flow. Contemporary Photographic Interventions, initiated by the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).

The exhibition series presents artists who live in Germany, have established their own distinct visual idioms and are now interrogating the medium of photography afresh. With artistic interventions they intervene in the very substance of the image or even in external reality itself. The question remains as to whether this work should still be labelled “documentary” or whether it is, in fact, a form of realism that spills over into fiction. Borderline Art Space will present two artistic positions from this exhibition series, one after the other, with works by Michael Schäfer and Viktoria Binschtock.

The series Models is based on photos of figures from politics and business, the majority published in Spiegel news magazine. Michael Schäfer adds his own photos of the heads and bodies of ordinary people in order to reveal the suggestive interplay between the staged poses of the politicians, the compressed moment in the shot, and the accompanying caption on the page of the magazine.

For the pictures in his Generation series, the artist takes catwalk shots of models from the internet and replaces their heads with studio shots of children’s faces. This gives rise to hybrid creatures that make the desires, longings, and physical ideals of our media and consumer age visible as digital phantoms.

In his earlier work Press Images, Michael Schäfer uses actors and props to restage news images right down to the last detail, before transferring them to large-format wall panels. In this way, the artist explores how the narrative of a press image functions and symbolically densifies a complex situation.

The Open Archive combines hitherto unused images from Michael Schäfer’s newspaper and internet image archive. Here, Schäfer uses striking images that were prevalent in the media and are therefore fresh in the minds of viewers. In this way, a highly topical stock of images will be built up, establishing a transfer to his previous works and also questioning the rhetoric, staging, and functional mechanisms of recent image production in a multilayered combination.

Michael Schäfer’s montages from Invasive Links are based on internet images reporting on the war in Syria and Iraq, which are frequently used for propaganda purposes. The artist considers what it might imply if we were to find ourselves as merely passive spectators in the midst of the action we see photographed or filmed. To this end, he uses a pixelated phone video, in which he places – as stand-ins for us – a couple of young people in their early twenties. The distance between foreground and background, between the visual world as found and that which has been added cannot be bridged in spite of the immediacy of our mediatized testimony.

Michael Schäfer (born 1964 in Sigmaringen, living in Berlin) reflects on the over-determination of press images from traditional print media as well as the nature of amateur videos. He explores the different ways images operate, their surplus of meaning and significance that literally presents the viewer with a historical and political constellation as a finished and closed interpretation. From such found images, Schäfer removes the faces of the actual protagonists and replaces them with his own photographs of actors. In this process, printer dots or pixels collide with the artist’s hyper-sharp image fragments. Schäfers approach to photography is a form of artistic mimicry, a kind of incorporation of images in order to deconstruct them. It can be seen within a tradition of artistic interest in the mass media going back to the 1970s that gained a new relevance with the digitalization of photography as well as the increasing use of artificial intelligence.