“Not a Moment, Not a Place” is the second exhibition of the newly founded Villa Heike Kunstverein and presents works by Ralf Brueck, Kathrin Ganser, and Daria Lou Nakov. Some of the works were produced specifically for this exhibition or are being shown for the first time. The works of the three artists originate from photographic “source images,” which they detach from their original contexts, overwrite through analog and digital manipulation and montage, and translate into new visual orders. They understand photography as a medium of transformation, in which the captured motifs not only become images, but in a further step are transformed once again into objects. The exhibition Not a Moment, Not a Place asks what this movement toward the objecthood of technical images means within the field of art, against the backdrop of a culture in which such images are otherwise consumed only as fleeting appearances on our digital displays.

Ralf Brueck studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, initially in the class of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and completed his studies in 2003 as a Meisterschüler of Thomas Ruff. Across his various bodies of work, he continually explores the possibilities of image-making through digital processing. With his mostly large-scale wall works, Brueck extends classical traditions of photography while simultaneously employing and interrogating the transformation of the medium in the digital age. Brueck is a member of the international artist group darktaxa. He has received numerous awards, including the Villa Romana Fellowship, the Leo Breuer Prize, and the Kunstfonds Bonn grant. His works have been exhibited internationally and are held in significant private and public collections.

Kathrin Ganser is an artist working in the intermedial field of artistic photography, installation, and media art. Her conceptual practice addresses notions of spatial imagery and image space, as well as media aesthetics and visual forms in both theory and practice. She studied Fine Art and Visual Culture at the Berlin University of the Arts and at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. From 2008 to 2014, she completed a doctoral dissertation on the “media-spatial image” at the Bauhaus University Weimar, earning a Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Arts)/Ph.D. in Fine Art. She has received various grants and awards for her work. Ganser lives and works in Berlin and is a member of several art- and media-theoretical networks, as well as a curator and co-founder of the Berlin-based artists’ collective pilote contemporary.

Daria Lou Nakov is a French artist who has been living in Berlin since 2021. After an initial year of study in Paris, she transferred in 2015 to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she first studied Inter-Architecture and Spatial Design before moving to the Photography Department, from which she graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts & Design. In her intermedial practice, Nakov combines photography, video, digital collage, and sculpture. She employs photographic processes to create imagined spatial worlds. Through her work, she questions the role of the viewer, our relationship to images in a hyperreal society shaped by knowledge and visual saturation, and the interrelations of space, surface, and perception. Since 2018, Nakov’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her practice also includes artist books, which have been presented at book fairs in Paris and Amsterdam.

Curated by Michael Schäfer and Sarie Nijboer