Wolfram Hahn

Christa, 2016—17
“While doing photo research in the Allende Center in Berlin-Köpenick, an elderly woman accidentally falls into the search field of my camera and starts dancing. A communicative process develops between us: The non-place around the shopping center, along with its purely functional infrastructure – parking lots, garbage cans, stairs or ventilation shafts – becomes an abstract stage set for her spontaneous, playful outbursts, which I capture with the camera.”

Like most shopping centers, the Allende Center is designed to be purely functional; it serves as a vending machine that is easy for everyone to understand and operate. It is not a place where you can stay indefinitely, not a space in which you can develop freely, even express yourself politically, that you can temporarily claim as your own or that you can use, whether for playing, sleeping or even taking photos - it does not allow critical consideration.

On the one hand, Wolfram Hahn's photo series “Christa (Allende Center)” documents this deeply regulated context, the faceless architecture, the strictly functional details and the aggressively promoted utility value, but at the same time counteracts it with the dancing Christa, who tries to subjectively appropriate the space and thus refuses its strictly one-dimensional functioning.