Seit dem in den 90er-Jahren ausgerufenen pictorial turnSince the pictorial turn proclaimed in the 1990s, the camera obscura has been regarded as the starting point of a pictorial imagination — for the artist Bärbel Möllmann, it is the instrument used to reflect on perception, time and space. The work was created during the first lock-down in Dresden 2020 in a walk-in camera obscura.

The pandemic has made the idea of the future even more abstract — and digitalization has made it even more real. The digital world and the analog world are merging more strongly and are in part no longer separable. The work “The future is not an extension of the present” attempts to visualize these two poles.

The motif originates from a single photograph: the digital-looking box is a wooden crate with luminous strips attached to its edges. The light beam on the center of the box is only possible for a brief moment of the camera obscura, at the exact moment when the sun shines through the lens. The adjoining series of five small works shows further details from the camera obscura, such as the course of the sun’s light or the play of shadows on the floor.

Bärbel MöllmannBorn in 1970. Lives and works as a freelance artist in Düsseldorf. She studied photography and media at the FH Bielefeld with Gottfried Jäger until 2001. Bärbel Möllmann has been working with the camera obscura since 1996. In her current works, she transforms rooms into walk-in camerae obscurae. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the Goethe-Institut Abu Dhabi, among others.

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