Annette v. Keudell
Opening of the exhibition “By the way: me”
Thursday, September 4, 2025, 6 p.m.
The artist will be present.
By the way: me
Between presence, identity, and digital disappearance
What remains when the body is no longer seen but calculated? What disappears when visibility becomes a condition of existence?
Bodies are not depicted but interrogated. Fragments, overlays, imprints, digital traces—figures that are present and at the same time refuse to be unambiguous. Bodies that elude systemic capture—fragmented, mirrored, digitized, emptied.
In a present in which identity can be indexed, optimized, or deleted, the works formulate a visual “by the way”: a marginal note that inscribes itself without conforming. Some works articulate themselves loudly and rebelliously, others remain tentative, ambivalent, poetic.
Visibility is not a neutral state, but a selective regulation. The works speak of disappearance—not as an aesthetic effect, but as a social process. They show resistance: against classification, against smoothing, against dissolution in the name of representation.
At the same time, they reflect attitudes: resignation, paralysis, the desire for invisibility—as well as gestures of refusal. Resistance here means not only confrontation, but also insisting on ambiguity, holding on to what eludes systems. Not only criticism of algorithmic recording, but also artistic distancing raises the question of what remains when the body is no longer the central carrier of identity.
At the same time, the attempt to opt out becomes visible—as an anti-surveillance act that subverts the grid. Some figures appear as camouflage, others as disturbances. They shift the conditions of legibility. This evasion is not a departure from the system, but a tactical maneuver on the margins: a shifting of one's own recognizability, a play with the possibility of being overlooked. This creates an interspace in which bodies are neither completely available nor completely disappeared.