Lee Friedlander in: FROM DAWN TILL DUSK. The Shadow in Contemporary Art

Based on around 40 international positions, the exhibition traces for the first time in a German museum the emancipation of the shadow as an image-producing, yet always media-reflexive theme within contemporary art. It examines the spectrum of shadow worlds, ranging from the existential to the threatening to the political. The shadow is where the absent and the present meet. It symbolically and immaterially refers to the existence of the material world and at the same time also contains its extinction. It is a trace that, like photography, functions as an index and at the same time is a projection surface that claims its own reality. In this context, the shadow can be read on the one hand as a metaphor for the crisis of the subject, but also as an important indicator of a reality beyond the superficially visible.