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Exhibition
06.12.25, 19:00 – 21.02.26, 15:00

CLÉMENT COGITORE
& ANDRZEJ STEINBACH

left: © COGITORE Clément, Les Indes Galantes, 2017, Video, Colour, 6 min. Production : Opéra national de Paris - 3° scène / Les Films Pélléas. Choreography : Brahim Rachiki, Igor Carouge, Bintou Dembele. Courtesy of the artist, Chantal Crousel Consulting, Paris (FR) and Reinhard Hauff Gallery, Stuttgart (DE); rights: © Ohne Titel (Figur I, aus der Serie "Figur I, Figur II"), 2015, Courtesy Andrzej Steinbach und VG-Bildkunst Bonn

curated by Sofia Ohmer & Florian Waldvogel 

FR 05.12.25, 19:00 OPENING

Clément Cogitore and Andrzej Steinbach belong to a generation of artists who engage critically with questions of identity, representation, and social reality. Despite their different media-based focuses, their practices reveal conceptual and methodological affinities that make a comparative view especially rewarding.

Andrzej Steinbach (*1983, Poland) is best known for his photographic series in which he analyses the construction of identity and its visual representation. His works are characterised by a reduced, precise aesthetic, in which models pose within neutral spaces, making social codes, clothing, and gestures visible as tools of self-staging. Steinbach is interested in the ambivalences of subjectivity and challenges socially codified attributions. His portraits from the series Figur I and Figur II (2013/14) are less psychological studies than analytical image spaces, where bodies, gazes, and clothing condense into a kind of visual grammar of social roles. Situated within the tradition of conceptual documentary photography, he deconstructs stereotypical representations while pointing to the fragility and mutability of social identities.

In contrast, French artist and filmmaker Clément Cogitore (*1983, France) works across media, employing photography, film, and video installation. His works unfold within the tension between fiction and documentation, often interweaving historical, political, and mythological dimensions. Cogitore’s artistic approach is narratively and visually complex; his works are marked by a dense, symbolically charged visual language. Themes such as memory, spiritual practices, power relations, and cultural conflict form the core of his oeuvre. His interest in collective rituals and social dynamics becomes particularly evident in Les Indes Galantes (2017), in which he explores the boundaries between contemporary society and archaic structures. This work as well as Tahir (2012) is shown for the first time in Austria at Kunstraum Innsbruck.

While Steinbach focuses on formal reduction and the analysis of social codifications, Cogitore operates with a multilayered aesthetic that reveals historical depths and contemporary ruptures. Both artists share an interest in the representation of social orders and their fragility, yet they differ markedly in their means and modes of visual articulation: Steinbach’s works are quiet, concentrated, and reflective, whereas Cogitore’s are epic, visually exuberant, and conceptually complex.

The juxtaposition of Steinbach and Cogitore presents two artistic positions that, beyond their specific media, reflect on social debates while opening new perspectives on questions of representation, memory, and identity.