Franziska Ostermann

Selfobservation

What do the photographic self-portraits that wake in the networks as avatars do while we surf or sleep?
Photographic splinters of views of our selfs represent our identity in a place that we ourselves cannot enter. The physicality itself becomes a barrier to its own representation. Photography can act as a mediator between the real and the virtual. In the form of a photograph, the body can cross the threshold from the physical, real world into the virtuality of the digital. But this transformation is not the exact opposite to its original form. The I trans- ported is a different one.
In photographs, views of faces become outsourced fragments of an ego that find their own identity in the virtuality of the digital and the Internet and develop a second reality, independent of their creator. They floatingly form a new shape.
I examine these splinter identities, revolve around them and make them visible on the intermediate level between virtuality and reality. By directing multiple selfies on duplicated smartphones of past selves onto myself, I communicate with versions of myself and allow the views that are otherwise separated by time to meet in the pictorial space of photography.
I assemble and interweave photographic elements in the virtual image space, condense temporal processes in the same way as I make the visual condensati- on of the virtual world visible. The photographic image montages are printed IRL behind acrylic glass, in URL they appear behind illuminated screens. The material in which they appear in exhibitions is based on the aesthetics of displays and thus places the image content in a context between digitality and reality.

Franziska Ostermann was born in 1992 in Kiel, Northern Germany. She got her master ́s degree at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design. As a post-conceptual multimedia artist her main interests are contemporary photography, video and writing as well as their interaction. In her work she explores hyperreality, virtuality and matters of identity. She has been awarded by the British Journal of Photography and was selected as a FRESH EYES european talent 2021 by GUP Magazine. Her Selfportrait FIRN was published on the cover of ProfiFoto magazine. She has been granted the award for uprising artist by the Bundesverband Bildender Künstler Schleswig-Holstein as well as the The New Talent Award by Canon and ProfiFoto magazine twice. Her poetry debut OSZIT was published by the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and her poems were published in literature magazines such as Mosaik, Signaturen or Archipel. Franziska Ostermann has taken part in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally.

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