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SHOOT!
Existential Photography

The exhibition will be shown at raumLABOR, Hamburger Straße 267, Braunschweig

With works by Sylvia Ballhause, Oscar Bony, Erik Kessels & Ria van Dijk, Agnès Geoffray, Jean-François Lecourt, Christian Marclay, Émilie Pitoiset, Niki de Saint Phalle, Roman Signer, Rudolf Steiner, Patrick Zachmann, and numerous well-known and anonymous fairground heroes and heroines.

In the period following World War I, a curious attraction appeared at fairs: the photographic shooting gallery. If a marksman's bullet hit the center of the target, this triggered a camera. Instead of winning a large balloon, he won a snapshot of himself showing him in the act of shooting.

Based on these fascinating images, Clément Chéroux, curator of photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, began tracing the history of this amazing method-from its popular use at fairground shooting galleries and how it fascinated many of the intellectuals at the time to its reappropriation and adaptation by contemporary artists. The exhibition features a moving series of images published by the agency head and artist Erik Kessels: more than sixty photographs of an aging woman, Ria van Dijk, who took pictures of herself every year in this way beginning in 1936.

Of the numerous contemporary stances that investigate the analogies between taking photographs and shooting, the exhibition first and foremost presents those works that take up the special, "existential" snapshot at fairs: it deals precisely with that gesture the shooters assume and in doing so take aim at the viewer, although it is their shot that first produces the image.

The video-sound installation Crossfire by Christian Marclay constitutes a special excursus within the exhibition-it is a sampling from Hollywood films that edits together those moments in which the actors on the screen begin to take aim at the movie theater audience. For eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the wild montage transports the viewer into a visual crossfire from all sides while at the same time affording a breathtaking percussion solo on an acoustic level.

At the end of the exhibition, visitors then have the opportunity of taking portraits of themselves in a photographic shooting gallery. Last but not least, the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig is happy to be able to contribute an explosive exhibition on the occasion of the opening of the raumLABOR, the new exhibition venue under the direction of the Braunschweig University of Art.

Please note the changed venue: raumLABOR, Hamburger Strasse 267, Braunschweig

A coproduction between the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig and the Rencontres d'Arles, curated by Clément Chéroux, with the kind support of the Braunschweig University of Art.

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Opening reception: Thursday, 07.10.10, 07.30 p.m. at raumLABOR, Hamburger Straße 267, Braunschweig

Opening hours:
Tues - Sun. 12 a.m. - 06 p.m.