submission for Lange Taylor Prize
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My current and future projects continue and extend a long and multi-stop travel experience which has brought me from the Indian subcontinent over the Pashtunistan region to the Balkan as the violent fringe of Europe. They are not only connected by phenomenons like failed states, authoritarian regimes, civil wars as well as hugh waves of displacement and migration, but by various traumas of destroyed illusions after 1945 both politically and socially. As a photographer, artist, and diarist I see my work as a scratched mirror of this broken post-war global utopia of freedom
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Though the original photograph remains visible as a core relais between the „before“ of the image and the „now“ of Böwig’s and others engagements with the material, it reflects a fundamental skepticism about truth, the representational validity of his own photographs. Böwig tries to grasp the invisible in what you can see and, at the same time, to raise doubts that we can get a sufficient understanding of what has happened by taking pictures
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