Elzel / Müller: Imagery of Disaster

At first glance, the individual images of the series of large-format, staged photographs created between 2002 – 2010 emanate above all aesthetic balance. Wiebke Elzel and Jana Müller designed their settings based on real catastrophes conveyed by public media. The catastrophe is neither named nor directly shown in the works, but only hinted at through the use of symbolic elements such as ashes, white flags, sandbags, smoke or an improvised sleeping camp in a palazzo. The two artists rely on a collective memory through which the narrative traces laid in their pictures can be linked constantly anew by the viewers with real events that they know from the media.