30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification, the East-West alignment of history is by no means over. This is particularly true for Germany, where there are two areas of experience in one country.
Thomas Neumann's biographical, historical and artistic strands also converge in this time of change. Born in Cottbus in 1975, the Düsseldorf-based photographer looks back on works created over the past 25 years: While still at school in the 1990s, he began traveling to the countries of the former Soviet Union and photographing there.
By 2019, he had created works that are presented in an overarching context in the exhibition and publication “Exakte Vertrauensgrenzen”. Neumann follows the traces of the imagery and meaning of Soviet socialism on site, after its promises of progress and a bright future had come to an end. His origins allow him to travel with a certain wealth of knowledge and experience, but also with a skeptical curiosity. Questions arise about the self and its integration into the collective experience of an abruptly ended ideological system that was actually designed for eternity. At best, an approximation is possible, as with the “exact confidence limit” of probability calculation, which can also be found in the title of a work from 1998. Neumann's archive does not tell a coherent narrative, neither of the development in the successor states of the Soviet Union, nor of the formation of the self. His restrained visual observations invite us to join him on a journey in which the horizons of interpretation remain open.