Fanny Harlan

Photographic installation
31.05.2019 – 07.07.2019

Japan and Germany are the two poles that make the artist Fanny Harlan to the whole person she is at the moment. At first it seemed like a coincidence when Harlan spent her first contact and also a year abroad in the Far Eastern country in 2015 - in a place that means for her the blossoming of life and historically a place that was facing the collective death like no other - Hiroshima. From photojournalism studies, Harlan immersed herself in the Japanese art worlds and experienced three years of instructive confrontations. Back in Germany since 2019, Harlan processes her image archive and juxtaposes couples in the now.

Her photographs delineate a diffuse borderland of dualities and deal with the intermediate tones defined poles of black and white, good and evil. In Zen, the ego is a circle without circumference. It is the centre of such a circle and at the same time is located at every point. From her subjective perspective, the artist creates a poetic-abstract fairy-tale world in which people and objects abruptly move back and forth in time and space in a pastel colour bed. Japanese impermanence mixes with an urge to artificially calm graphic perfection. Harlan abruptly and yet gently changes locations and perspectives and playfully raises questions whose answers she herself does not know.