August Sander/Barbara Fässler @ Galerie Krethlow Bern

The exhibition shows a domino of different approaches to the concept of archive in photography and moves on a scale between the unforeseeable and the plan, between open perception and directed “mise en scène”, between subjectivity and objectivity, between induction and deduction. Does the found material lead to certain principles of order or do the subjects just appear after the search, following determinate categories? Do we construct our world through a preexisting pattern of thoughts and images or do we recognize and order starting from our unforeseeable experience? Is our existence surrendered to chance or is it possible to guide its direction through the creation of continuous order? The exhibition of August Sander’s photographs from his Opus Magnum “People of the 20th Century” („”Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts“) from the 1920s and 1930s during the Weimar Republic and pictures by Barbara Fässler from 1990-2016, emanates from the theoretical publication “Fotografie, Archiv und Erkenntnis im Werk von August Sander” written by Fässler. The book was published in 2015 in German by Edition Atelier belonging to Galerie Krethlow Bern and in 2014 in Italian at Postmediabooks Milan, with an introduction by Paolo Spinicci.