Centre de la photographie Genève presents the first solo institutional exhibition of Anne Morgenstern, a German artist based in Switzerland. Dedicated to her latest project, the exhibition explores the interplay between body and identity, in a subtle but persistent deconstruction of social norms and expectations surrounding the body.
The flux of images, tightly edited and sequenced, allows questions to gradually form in the visitors’s mind: what makes a body beautiful and desirable? What makes a body normal, and who decides when a body falls outside of the norms? How are our identities embedded in our bodies, and how do our bodies enable us to perform these identities? How are these identities negotiated? How does our relationship to our bodies shift and evolve, and where is our agency? How do we desire, and act on these desires?
With this project, Anne Morgenstern first gives visibility to individual bodies, either in their salient uniqueness or their banality—two notions which become entangled and increasingly difficult to differentiate as we make our way through the exhibition. The artist addresses, skillfully and with sensibility, an urgent need for visibility and representation for persons whose bodies or desires do not conform to the most common, and therefore the most visible, social expectations. She does so without indexing or classifying them, and without posing new clear-cut boundaries, categories, and definitions. Finally, this corpus weaves parallels between images and the mechanisms of desire: objects, animals, interiors, and natural elements are juxtaposed to bodies in ways that appear both perfectly coherent and entirely coincidental, just as desire resists a full analytical dissection. Textures and sensations echo each other throughout the pages, repeated colours and shapes guide our gaze from one image to the next, and from one body to the next. The self and the individual dissolve into a flux of visuals and sensations, drawing us in, inviting us to put our own desires to the test, and indeed, to desire, fully and without shame.
