Role Images - Role Playing

This is the first exhibition – featuring photographs, graphics, videos and installations - that gives a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon of role playing as a theme of art, from paraphrased “tableaux vivants“ of the 19th century to role-playing games in internetbased social networks.

Hippolyte Bayard‘s early photographic self-portraits as a drowned man and as a suicide, the pictures of Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy or Julika Rudelius’ video of young men introduced to the tricks and cheats of the power of political speech: They all engage in performative games with role models. This can be roles which assume the artist’s ego in the self-portrait or comment on our role understanding with regard to social class, ethnicity, gender, age or social power structures.

Roles, actors, stages, scripts - a glance at the imagery of these terms reveals society as a theatre. We are all actors playing different cultural, social and biological roles. Life is a theatre in which we perform different roles in order to fulfil social norms and expectations and to present our own “self”. Art explores problematic areas of friction and breaking points between roles and actors. It reflects our desire to look behind the mask, where we seem to expect “authentic” persons.

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KünstlerInnen: David LaChapelle , Rodney Graham ,