The exhibition “Kreuzpositionen” takes up the question of the Christian motif of the crucifixion in contemporary photography.  Even in a secularized world, recurring references to religious symbols do not lose their topicality and are given a new interpretation in artistic practice. Bernd Jansen, VA Wölfl and Miron Zownir explore themes of Christian iconography, alternating between documentary photography, performance and painterly intervention. The metaphor of the cross in particular, alluding to the Passion of Christ, is a frequent subject and finds its counterpart in various forms in photography. 

Bernd Jansen accompanied Joseph Beuys with his camera for two decades and also documented Beuys' intensive preoccupation with religious rites. Crosses as figurations of thought are not a reference to the suffering of Christ, but to human existence in general. Jansen's 12-part photographic installation "Stations. Encounters with Joseph Beuys“ shows the demonstration ”Anatomy" in the 1969 Beuys class with the Beuys student Kurt Verhuven (together with Anatol Herzfeld and Johannes Stüttgen).

VA Wölfl, who, like Bernd Jansen, studied photography under Otto Steinert at the Folkwang Hochschule, is showing a 6-part photographic work from the “Crucifixion” action. Wölfl's performance, captured in documentary photographs, integrates his body into a cross motif through expressive overpainting and experiences the crucifixion as a processual act in which body, painting and cross symbol merge into a unity.

Miron Zownir, a photographic artist of the underground, has been touching his audience since the early 1980s with his uncompromising and existential motifs of the subculture. As with Diane Arbus, Zownir's camera eye focuses on the outsider or individualist shaped by fate. He encounters the cross during his photographic milieu studies and journeys into the underworld and captures it in obscure and disturbing black and white images. In this seemingly hopeless situation of a destructive reality, the cross becomes a symbol of hope and human cohesion.

The exhibition is sponsored by:
Cultural Office City of Düsseldorf