Weekend Portfolio: Kyra Tabea Balderer
All images and text by Kyra Tabea Balderer.
An essential element and central theme of my artistic practice is the examination of the question in what way our perception and our perspectives are historically and culturally determined. I use a wide range of visual languages and try to combine different concepts and narratives from the past with current perspectives.
Especially the modernist abstraction plays an important role. In this context, I am interested to what extent the history of western modernity can be understood as a substructure and condition for our current way of perception. What kind of paradigms and canonizations has modernity produced and how do they shape our current view?
Photography serves for me as a central medium, vehicle and important creative tool with which I continuously develop my interests. By mixing and entangling different materials and techniques - old and contemporary - I try to create breaks and shifts. At the same time, the transformation of an object into an image creates material and conceptual shifts that raise questions about spatiality and the relationship between surface and depth in the photographic image. In addition to the subject, there is the question of the representativeness of photography and what residual amounts, displacements and symbolic qualities can arise in the process of photographic transfer.
My photographs often take up the subject of physicality and the human relationship to the world of things. The topics of work, mass production and commodity fetishism as well as one's own physicality and their compensation in the technical media is a central starting point for the development of new image compositions. The focus lies in the imagery and concepts such as Animism, Archaic and Primitivism. The question of the western view on other cultures and worldviews (past and current) is guiding.
