As part of the Photoweekend, the exhibition "Cross Positions" revisits the question of the traditionally Christian pictorial motif of the crucifixion in contemporary photography. Recurring references to religious symbols and rites do not lose their topicality even in a secularised world and face a new contextualisation and interpretation in artistic practice.

In the course of their work, Bernd Jansen, VA Wölfl and Miron Zownir deal with themes of Christian iconography and oscillate between documentary photography, performance and painterly intervention. In particular, the metaphor of the cross, alluding to the story of Christ's passion, is a frequent subject and finds its counterpart in various forms. Existential questions about life and death, faith and spirituality, devotion and suffering are renegotiated in the medium of photography.

Bernd Jansen accompanied Joseph Beuys for two decades with his camera and also documented Beuys' intensive preoccupation with religious rites. Here, crosses as figurations of thought do not form 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 Beuys class of 1969 with the Beuys student Kurt Verhuven (together with Anatol Herzfeld and Johannes Stüttgen). Beuys and Verhuven do not stage a re-enactment of the traditional passion story, but his own interpretation of spirituality and being human.

VA Wölfl, who like Bernd Jansen studied photography with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang Hochschule, is showing a 9-part photographic work from the action "Crucifixion". 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 one.

Miron Zownir, a photographic artist of the underground, has been touching his audience since the early 1980s with uncompromising and existential motifs of the subculture. As with Diane Arbus, the fated outsider or individualist is the focus of Zownir's camera eye. 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.

Janine Blöß/Weltkunstzimmer

Framework programme

Vernissage, 28 January 2015 from 7 pm

Participation in the Photoweekend Düsseldorf 30 January - 1 February 2015

Artist talk with Bernd Jansen, VA Wölfl, Friedhelm Mennekes, Johannes Stüttgen and Dr Sabine Maria Schmidt on Sunday, 1 February 2015 at 4 pm. Chair of the discussion: Carl Friedrich Schröer

Finissage, 6 March 2015 from 7 pm, with film screening (planned)