Pavel Wolberg: Düsseldorf

Pavel Wolberg displays a new series shot in an amusement park in Düsseldorf, in which he continues to engage with costumes and masks as the unmistakable characteristics of the gap between the self and its representations. This preoccupation takes a new turn in the current series of photographs: The subjects were shot photographing themselves while facing funhouse mirrors in Düsseldorf's amusement park. These mirrors' chimeric effect distorted their reflection and produced grotesque figures. Wolberg photographed their reflection from the side, while they were shooting their own selfie from a different angle. In doing so, the artist interfered with the fundamentals of the selfie as a medium of self-representation, seizing it from the original photographers and appropriating it as his own image.

Wolberg's unique approach accentuates the connection between contemporary selfie culture and the carnival phenomenon, which developed throughout the Middle Ages and climaxed in the Renaissance. His work proposes the selfie as the direct continuation of the carnival's eccentric "reversed world." The latter is founded on an alternative world view that does not acknowledge the restrictions of ordinary, lawful existence.