The individual is being celebrated as probably never before in human history. Every single person is a superstar. With old styling the Ego is actually, with new styling it is virtually shaped, enhanced, Facebook-liked, surrounded with many friends. The education network allows us to grow up as frustration-free as possible; the social networks promise the Ego persistently great attention. The Ego is celebrated, tuned, elevated – until it falters, until it doubts, until it breaks. Until real and imaginary, inner and outer reality fall apart. We are currently living in a highly narcissistic world, in which community, community spirit, the notion of being part of a whole is being outshone, cross-faded by the possibilities of ‘enhanced realities’, by aggrandised self-perception in the social media spotlight. The selfie is an obvious symbol of this.

A few years ago, in the fashion photography context, I wrote: ‘The principle of the fashionable, of coming and going, of light-footed change, of the hyping and forgetting of the substantial break with traditions with simultaneous seizing of traditions as mere particles, as freely available taste, style, colour and shape particles. The hybridisation of life manifested itself in this in the Nineties. The “Heroin Chic” fashion style is perhaps the most vivid example of this, or the “Sovjet” dress label. They demonstrate how the real world, history, addiction was used as a store of building blocks, a store of material for the world of signs, for the commercial branding of so-called new individual life. The taste of reality. Individualism and identity games also become more and more important in the 1990s because there is virtually no common, political, historical, ethical etc. project now; in the words of the philosopher Lyotard there is no longer any great narrative in the Post-Modern which is supportive, no utopia, but also no real enemy; even existential needs have almost entirely disappeared for most people in the Western context. What remains is the exploring and acting out of one’s own self, self-realisation, which perfectly suited the capitalistic, materialistic logic of consumption and competition.’¹

What had small beginnings in the Nineties has since then spiralled upwards. The image is a new assurer of identity, new central communication tool. Rank in the ‘Like’ competition is measured against (self-)image. In a personal and cultural sense too, I can put together and modify my identity out of free-floating and artificial images and other signs entirely at will. In the form of a collage of decidedly non-natural, often also apparently contradictory properties and ‘surfaces’. (At least) on the Net, respectively in the image, I can detach my desired identity from my everyday identity (and also from my everyday body) almost at will and embed it in a new online narration. These sign-identities relate, in their turn, to other sign-identities, therefore to images and not to referents, to bodies ‘in the real world’. We are ranging, therefore, increasingly in the ‘Imaginary’ (Lacan). Photographic images are the most important new sign form during the creation and modelling of post-modern identities. Identity politics, still carried out with and on bodies after the war, has become a new ‘identity politics’ with and on the sign, on the image of the body, of being. It is becoming a game with signs. Is what used to be an absolutely central root of identity, like (biological, national, ‘analogue’) origin, really dissolving entirely into the digital at the moment? Alternatively: Is there a new origin and identity through and in the digital, that is to say, in the reproducing of codes and in the citing of cultural signs of all kinds? Is there a reliable place, or only the sign-world’s hovering, floating, sliding, bi-polar bouncing on the Net?

Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier light up, in their ten-channel audio-visual installation Double Extension Beauty Tubes (2008–2010), a firework display of image identities. They practically lived for two, three years with youths, with Emos; they met them, frequented their hang-outs and went out with them. The first generation to have grown up with digital media almost from birth and to have been confronted with visual worlds in the Internet for a few years. From the thousands of photos and videos there arose the book Neue Menschen; and this impressive audio-visual installation, which they present at Sammlung Prinzhorn and which combines these youths’ awareness of life, their keenness for self-presentation into a total artwork. 

In Maya Rochat’s project and book Crystal Clear she plumbs, as can be read in the publisher’s text, ‘the depths of the photographic surface using symbolically charged, both analogue and digital visual compositions.’² Rochat intermingles her shots, the text tells us, radically associatively with self-written impressions and third-party image fragments. She always uses her immediate surroundings as her point of departure, we are told. Portraits of friends and landscape shots interlace in dense, intimate visual textures, which Rochat in turn – militantly surgically, almost – scratches, dissects and weaves back together. Scratching, dissecting, cutting up, injuring is a central, consistent theme with Rochat. Its effect is so forceful that it is as though an existential experience were also accompanying this imaging process.

Melanie Bonajo’s work is equal parts photography and performance, video and installation too. Bonajo seems to be a driving force and a driven person simultaneously; her work appears to follow a delicate thread of life and repeatedly to question the work, the person, the present. Particularly impressively she thematises the conditions of being today, in the confrontation with other people, with herself, with the mental and material structures which surround her, and with the ‘spiritual void’ which now characterises our life.