From 1998 to 2014 I worked with Sabine Haubitz as artist duo in the fields of photography, video sculpture and site-specific installation(„Haubitz + Zoche“). Our central concern was the examination of urban space and the sensitization to the mechanisms that work within it. In the late years of our collaboration, topics such as climate change and the handling of resources became the focus of our work. Since 2014 I am continuing the work in my own name. > https://dfa.photography/en/mitglied/sabine-haubitz
"Our mostly serially arranged photographic works revolve around the themes of architecture, urban space and ecology. A recurring motif is the architectural façade, which reveals complex social and cultural developments. For us, photography is an outward-looking activity. We look at the world and distill a picture through composition and detail. It is always important for us to create a condensation of the seen situation without stylistic components determining the picture superficially. The conceptual approach then becomes apparent in the serial sequence, which usually grows over several years. Photographic observation, pointed watching, is also an important source of inspiration for our installation projects." (Haubitz+ Zoche, 2013)
Interview with Stephan Maier on the occasion of our participation in the Havana Biennial 2012, published in Kunstforum International 2012 (in German).
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In the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a large number of cinemas were built in both the urban and rural areas of South India. The buildings display an unconventional mix of local building styles and Western influences. The colourful façades, suggestive of theatrical sets, provide a foretaste of the cinematic experience in the hall itself. On three journeys to India between 2010 and 2014, we documented these buildings, whose architectural language can be described as a hybrid modernism. At the same time, we took photographs of church buildings with formal similarities. The series refers to a search for identity in post-colonial India that manifests itself in the facades of the buildings.
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The photo series depicts unfinished luxury hotel complexes in Sinai, Egypt. The strictly composed photographs make the buildings appear like architectural models, whose purified formal language, freed from all decoration, makes the functional planning visible. Global mass tourism finds its counterpart in this treasure trove of forms of world architecture, which ranges from the Chinese pagoda, the ancient temple to European modernism. In the unfinished intermediate state of the hotel complexes, the mechanisms of the staging of tourist dream worlds are clearly visible. "Sinai Hotels" is an example of a development in tourism in which destinations become almost arbitrarily interchangeable and lose their spatial significance.
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The series shows film sets in the Bavaria Filmstadt Munich and Ramoji Filmcity, Hyderabad. What interests us here is the unfinished state in which the illusion is subtly exposed, a moment in which the place itself unfolds its own life, develops its own narrative. Often building materials, tools or ladders still stand around, the stage lights can be seen or the edges of the stage sets where their materiality becomes visible.
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The series focuses on large-format construction site tarpaulins on building facades. Here we address the tension between reality and fiction. Facade simulations, for which buildings under construction or reconstruction are clad with printed tarpaulins, can be described as a novel urban phenomenon that shapes the image of today's major cities. While some of these illusory architectures already succeed in making it difficult to distinguish between the image and the concrete architecture during the factual encounter in the urban space, the illusory effect in the series facelift is even intensified. Photographing a photograph can lead to the levelling of those clues that would have betrayed the masquerade of the building if they had actually been viewed
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