Sarah Schönfeld
exhibition “Techno Worlds”
All You Can Feel
Since the 1950s, we in the Western world have increasingly come to understand our most intimate desires and experiences as the products of a so-called “chemical self”. We are able to explain moods and diseases both physiologically and psychologically through an imbalance of substances in the body. In her book Synthetic Worlds, Esther Leslie describes how pharmacy and photography have been closely linked and intertwined since their industrial birth.
For the work All You Can Feel (2013), liquified pharmaceuticals, synthetically produced bodily substances and illegal drugs have been placed on the sensitive side of a photographic negative. After a few days or weeks, the resulting chemical interaction between the photo-emulsion and the substance becomes visible, which then gets enlarged in the darkroom. By integrating the pharmaceuticals into the photographic process, they are used as an alternative exposure method. The substances “hack” the system of the negative by attacking its surface and getting deep into its structure, revealing themselves as a kind of portrait. In All You Can Feel, the possibilities of photography are explored at the frontiers of what can be portrayed visually – the interface between representation and reality.
Biography
Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld, lives and works in Berlin. Based on the assumption that our western liberal understanding of the world is not sufficient to cope with the ever increasing global accumulation of problems, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld continuously designs various mysterious laboratories and treatments, in which solutions, healing and meaning are attempted to be generated anew with the most diverse radically interdisciplinary methods. Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld is jestingly looking for relevant updates of so called folk wisdoms. Her labs materialize through installations, performances, sculptures, instruments, photographs and collages. She includes approaches from various fields in her practice like science, religion, mythology, magic and technology. She investigates different kinds of knowledge- and truth-production which constitute, control and reproduce the human self and the agreement called 'reality' in our world. Her works have been shown at numerous solo and group exhibitions including Berghain/Boros Collection, Strasbourg Biennale, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, MAK Wien/ Vienna Biennale, among others.