Durchblick
Lilly Lulay, Susa Templin

Lilly Lulay (*1985, Frankfurt am Main) deals with photography as an integral part of our daily lives. In her works, she uses her own and found photographs as ‘raw material’, which she arranges in collages, films or expansive installations. In her more recent works, Lulay’s special attention is focused on digital image processing and storage: How is (image) information collected? What do the algorithms of the huge digital data stores read out of our image data? And how does this in turn affect our perception of images? In her series of works “Lesson I: The Algorithmic Gaze”, Lulay recreates the principle of digital image storage through algorithms by mounting black lacquered wooden panels on images that only allow conclusions to be drawn about the motif behind them through small geometric sections. Mathematical formulae illustrate the processes to which image data are subjected by algorithms and AIs. Lulay thus makes it whether from a person or an artificial intelligence (AI) – is always selectively processed.

Susa Templin (* 1965, Hamburg) uses photographs of architectural set pieces such as walls, doors or windows for her works. In doing so, she picks up on traditional subjects in art history, which in a figurative sense can also be understood as threshold places of mental changes and transitions. She finds her motifs in her immediate surroundings. For example, since the beginning of her artistic career, she has photographed the view from the windows of her studios. In her most recent photographic installations, Templin investigates the perception of spaces by deconstructing and reconstructing them. To do this, she takes a look at architectural elements with an analogue medium-format camera. She arranges the resulting hand prints in spatial models, photographs them again and prints them – sometimes on top of each other – on large-format transparent foils. Hung in the exhibition space, further overlaps of the architectural images emerge depending on the perspective. The result is a labyrinth of abstract spatial ideas that allows viewers to perceive space in an almost infinite number of ways.