The Centre de la photographie Genève presents the first institutional monographic exhibition of Anne Morgenstern, a German artist based in Switzerland. Entirely devoted to her latest project, the exhibition explores the relationship between body and identity, deconstructing the norms and social expectations surrounding the body.

The rigorously edited and sequenced flow of images in this corpus allows questions to gradually emerge among visitors: what makes a body attractive and desirable? What makes a body normal, and who decides that a body is outside the norm? How are our identities anchored in our body, and how does it allow us to perform these identities? How are these identities negotiated? How do the relationships we have with our body change and evolve, and what faculties do we possess? How do we desire, how do we act in response to these desires?

With this project, Anne Morgenstern gives visibility to individual bodies, whether in their immediate singularity, or in their apparent banality — two notions that intertwine and become increasingly difficult to differentiate as time goes by of the visit. Here, the artist creates a body of images that responds skillfully and with sensitivity to an urgent need for visibility and representation of people whose bodies or desires do not conform to the common social expectations, and therefore the most visible. It does so without indexing or classifying them, and therefore without imposing new demarcations, categories or definitions.

Eventually, her corpus builds parallels between the images and mechanisms of desire: objects, animals, interiors and natural elements are juxtaposed to bodies in a way that seems both perfectly coherent and totally fortuitous, just as desire resists an exhaustive analytical dissection. Textures and sensations echo through the images, while colors and repeated shapes guide the sight from one photograph to another, from one body to another. Carried by this rhythm, the individual dissolves in a flow of visuals and sensations, attracting us, inviting us to put our own desires to the test, and to desire, fully and without shame.

In parallel with the exhibition, the book Macht Liebe devoted to this project and including an essay by Danaé Panchaud, will be published in 2022 by Hartmann Books in Stuttgart.

With the generous support of the City of Geneva, the Department of Culture of the Canton of Zürich, the Landis & Gyr Foundation, the ProHelvetia Foundation and the Erna and Curt Burgauer Foundation.