Offert Albers
0-12 Beaufort, 2023
Set of 13 images, projected
Faders 0-12, 2023
13 archival pigment prints, aluminum frames
each 30 x 40 cm
Courtesy the artist
For the exhibition And This is Us 2023, Offert Albers creates a two-part photographic work whose parts are of equal value to one another, as they both point to the importance of photography as a secondary reference.
The result is two series of images that the artist juxtaposes. One consists of images that take the Beaufort scale as their point of departure. This scale indicates a spectrum of thirteen wind forces used to classify and name wind according to its speed – from windless to hurricane. The spectrum comes from observations of the effects of wind on the environment, i.e. from phenomenological criteria. Albers does not choose to visualise wind speed on land, rather on water surfaces, which is important for navigation. The artist has researched and written to numerous German museums and archives to request access to depictions of various sea states and to document the works – photographic as well as pictorial – in the context of their archives. In each of these storage locations, he photographs a picture representing a level of the Beaufort scale in connection with its institution. 13 images have been gathered in all. In addition, he searches for one image of the wind measurement scale from printed photo volumes and from digital image stocks respectively. Albers assembles all 39 images as a sequence in video format.
The second series also consists of 13 images. The motif is a disco ball, a pop culture icon whose image the artist commissioned from product photographers using digital freelancer platforms. The photographers, who all received the same assignment, had to create as close an image of the product as possible on this basis. Offert Albers is not interested in the final processed and post-produced images, but in the unprocessed digital data, the RAW files. These are the files where the camera writes on to the storage medium largely without editing and from which meta-information concerning the creation of the image and the technique used can be read. Without digital retouching, the 13 commissioned works reveal their expanded pictorial spaces, the space in which the image is created: the set, technical aids, lights, background, right up to the camera and the photographers themselves, who are depicted in the mirror fragments.
Albers works conceptually. In this double series, he sets out to investigate what is not elevated to the status of a photographic subject yet nevertheless comes into view. The work explores photography as an imaging medium of phenomena, i.e. not as a direct image, but via the indirect route of the method of making one thing visible through another. It is not the motif, the content of the image that is at the centre of his investigation, but the second-degree information content.
Offert Albers (*2000 in Wiesbaden, DE) has been a student at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) with Prof. Judith Hopf since 2020. Previously he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE) with Prof. Franka Hörnschemeyer. His artistic practice deals mainly with photography and concept art. Among others, he exhibited at the following institutions: Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim (DE), Hotel Nizza, Frankfurt am Main (DE), KIT – Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf (DE). An exhibition is currently planned for 2023 at the 1822 Forum, Frankfurt am Main (DE).
