"Teaching & Learning Photography" IV
On 1.3.23, Eldagsen & Hagmann talked to Judith Samen, Professor of Artistic Photography at the Kunsthochschule Mainz, about teaching & learning photography today.
- Prof. Judith Samen:
- Since 2011, Professor Judith Samen (born 1970) has led the class for artistic photography at the Kunsthochschule Mainz. Prior to this, she had been a professor of art at the University of Siegen since 2003, first as a substitute and since 2005 with a full professorship.
- Judith Samen studied fine arts first in Münster, then at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the sculpture class of Fritz Schwegler, whose master student she became in 1995. She also studied biology.
- Her art moves between staging and authenticity of human existence. Physicality, food, as well as elements from art history and everyday life are taken up in her work. In search of unseen and touching pictorial creations, she formulates works between poetry and the drastic. She combines vulnerability and humour, transience and deep bodily sensibility with tragedy and comedy. In the process, the seemingly familiar expands towards the absurd.
- Her artistic strategy includes irritation as a means to openly challenge viewers. Her works are shaped by female bodily experience and negotiate the image of man at all ages. The sometimes radical self-portrayals continue positions such as those of Claude Cahun, John Coplans or Rodney Graham. In the tradition of the Fluxus movement, Judith Samen blurs the boundaries between art and everyday life. To this end, she uses the reality-representative character of photography. Her work includes photographs, spatial installations, drawings, videos and performative action.
www.judithsamen.com
@judithsamen
