The Bonner Kunstverein is pleased to announce two new exhibitions: Czech photographer Markéta Othová’s project, which has been especially conceived for the architecture of the Kunstverein, and the first solo show in Germany of the British artist Ed Atkins. Othová’s analogue photographs meet Atkins’ high-definition video installation: black-and-white as well as color photographs of everyday moments and poetic stillness confront computer-generated film sequences with precise editing and intense HD colors. The two artists' practices are considerably different, yet they both pursue a self-reflexive approach of their respective medium. Although conceived as solo presentations, the two positions engage here in a substantial dialogue, in which Atkins’ video projection echoes Othová's photographs. In its almost 50-year history, Bonner Kunstverein has engaged in an ongoing dialog with contemporary photography. Today we are more than happy to introduce an important artistic position from Eastern Europe.

Markéta Othová (*1968 in Brno, lives and works in Prague) once compared her photographs to words that interact to form sentences. The syntactical arrangement of the works is an essential component of her artistic praxis. Her selection of images for this exhibition revolves around two kinds of spaces: the domestic realm and the realm of nature. Othová brings these spaces contrapuntally together and points out to their mutual correspondences. Markéta Othová snaps inconspicuous moments in quiet, mostly black-and-white compositions. Keeping up with Czech photographic tradition, she fuses lyrical and conceptual approaches into a visual language that questions and traces the possibilities of the medium. The artist’s reflective perspective on the photographic medium also shapes her unusual concept for the Bonner Kunstverein. The rear half of the hall has been hung in an axisymmetrical way with the front half and thus plays up the mirror as a structural element that, on a wider level, shapes photography technically, but is also recurrent in the discourse about the medium. With her precise compositional structure, Markéta Othová has created an intriguing experience of space that, when walking through it, stopping to linger and study the prints, proves to be an echo-filled quest for the nature of the photographic image.