Beyond the Limits

The exhibition Jenseits der Grenzen (Beyond the Limits) collects together three photo projects by Mitra Tabrizian from the years 1998 to 2001: Minimal Utopia, Silent Majority and the eight-part photo series Beyond the Limits. The large-format photographs depict apparently android people in an autistic world. Unscrupulous, highly-developed technologies make it seem that everything is for sale and can be replaced; even conscience becomes an exchangeable product. Tabrizian’s dystopian science fiction belongs to the tradition of filmic narratives. However, the audience is not seduced by sentimental cinematic arrangements, but is confronted with a strangely emotionless, one might even say antiseptic, flawless world. A provocative indifference is dominant, even in the most bloody of dramas, and it almost appears as if human sympathy is no longer in keeping with the times. Here the omnipresent “corporate culture” is presented with an aesthetic mirror image, for these bizarre simulations of political and social situations prove to be exaggerated images of social developments. Art does not invent. It merely shows the potential tendencies of our reality in a radical way.