The German photographer Kerstin Flake has made an impact with her enigmatic pictures of bizarre configurations, taken with an analog large-format camera. In Replaces she has photographed installations in empty industrial premises at the Gründerzeithaus in Leipzig, which functions as her studio. The geography here is significant, as this part of the former East Germany is rapidly changing. New capital is being generated as a result of hectic property speculation, and in parallel old industry has ground to a halt – its traditional rooting has been lost, and the present is in a state of flux.
In Flake’s work the spaces have been emptied of their original function, and the normal physical rules of the game have been abandoned. The places emerge anew, now dominated by irrational compositional principles. Objects are animated like props on a stage. Worn-out window frames on edge and doors stand vertically in the room – the spatial elements stand like absurd exclamation marks that prevent both exit and entry. Furniture is stacked hysterically, with a crazed logic. Men in suits appear in the compositions as rigid horizontal objects, trousered legs create diagonal lines. As a pointed statement this publication is a poetic but also politically oriented investigation of displacements and alternative logic.
