The third edition of SITE - photographic works presents a group exhibition entitled Black Box at Galerie Christian Lethert in Cologne from June 15 to July 8, 2022. The five artists Hanna Becker, Marc Botschen, Cihan Cakmak, Franziska Kaufhold and Jan Ladwig deal with inner states and the construct of identity in different ways through their photographic observations. The partly fragmentary search and formation processes of social, cultural and family profiles question photography as a medium and its modes of action within the concept of reality on a further level.

With the multidisciplinary project The Game Hanna Becker points to the world as the stage of human existence. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of visual languages to address the absurdities, ambitions, and fantasies of the human condition. By assembling different pictorial contexts, languages and materials, dynamic fields of tension are opened up both in space and between an inner psychological level and an outside.

Based on a found ancestral passport, Hamburg-based artist Marc Botschen's work Piece of Cake conceptually brings together self-portraits, everyday intimacies, and philosophical text fragments like ingredients of a cake batter. The intertwining of content and formal narratives are explored both in his book and on the wall, provoking a radical dialectic of not knowing. Here, the apparent certainty of identity and our visual notion of images are deliberately subverted, revealing new possibilities for interpretation.

In her work em fractal Cihan Cakmak approaches and distances herself equally with her familial and cultural past. Dreams, physicality and encounters are interwoven within intimate self and group stagings, sound and video into a web that tells of an often repressed and marginalized identity, but also of emancipation.

The installation Untiefe by Franziska Kaufhold deals in a sensitive way with the concept of the »island«. The geographical location is here the basis and symbol of an inner emotional state. The sensual spatial installation - a collage of photographs, videos and audio recordings takes up the entire space and allows the viewer to literally dive into the author's world of memories and thoughts.

Jan Ladwig uses a chance attic find as the trigger and basis for the project Abbildung Ähnlich. The result is a photographic narrative about the unknown Stefan Klein. The fictional story is composed of the rearrangement of existing facts as well as parts invented by the author. In a documentary manner, the accuracy and binding nature of photographic images is questioned.