In cooperation with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the Hochschule Darmstadt, the Kunsthochschule Mainz and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, the RAY MASTER CLASS was held for the second time as an intensive workshop, led by the RAY artist Johanna Diehl. The aim of the RAY MASTER CLASS is to give national and international photography students the chance to explore their work under new eyes and to generate more attention among young visitors. The works of the RAY MASTER CLASS are on display at the Museum Angewandte Kunst from 1 September 2021 until 9 January 2022. Another exhibition is planned for 2022 at the Kunststiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim.
RAY MASTER CLASS Exhibition
Museum Angewandte Kunst 1 September, 2021 – 9 January 2022
Kunst- und Kulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim 2022 (date to be announced)
Photographic images were and are used to serve ideological purposes, to exaggerate or devalue something. "Every photographic image is above all a sign that someone has spent time and effort to communicate something; every communication in photography is characterised by a tendentious colouring of its rhetoric." (Allan Sekula). In times of alternative facts, climate change, pandemics, migration and an omnipresent flood of images, ideologically influenced, populist movements and ways of thinking determine which problems are represented and positioned by which images.
The interesting thing about photography, however, is that it is not just a serving medium for ideological rhetoric and products, but also a medium that can lead to a distribution of the sensible (Jacques Rancière), that can be political. Therefore, the notion that images and image-making have the potential to make sense of the world, and that photography can be assumed to have its own form of thinking, is at the heart of the RAY MASTERCLASS that I am leading. Furthermore, especially in times of ideological intensification and the terror of the same (Byung-Chul Han), there must always be a decided subjectivity, an attitude of one's own and an ethic of image-making, as well as the "imposition" not to simplify the complexity of reality, but to leave it in the picture.
— Johanna Diehl
RAY MASTER CLASS Students
Benedikt Ackermann (*1994 GER), Dilan Alt (*1994 GER), Yawei Chen (*1992 CN), Isidora Gilardi (*1992 CL), Annika Grabold (*1995 GER), Hetty Hollm (*1996 GER), Mariam Kvirikashvili (*1993 GE), Aslı Özdemir (*1993 GER), Sinah Osner (*1990 GER), Tessa Scheufler (*1999 GER), Robert Schittko (*1987 GER), Fabian Stransky (*1990 GER), Tatiana Vdovenko (*1992 RU)
