The works of Corinna Engel and Christian Kaiser create a nihilistic vision of beauty, grace, and fragility - a dangerous, immoral portrayal of decadence and neglect. They depict the almost life-hostile beauty of a time and a world shaped by mass media and the internet, by superficiality, amateur pornography, and ridicule, by drugs, techno parties, sex, violence, loneliness, and vulnerability, not as a warning or outcry, but as something very rare, special, narcissistic, and fragile, as the transient, glittering beauty of "getting lost.“
They reflect youth amidst feelings of unacceptance and unlovability. They portray young women amidst neglect, drugs, group sex, violence, nudity, and prostitution. They reflect the mindset of the "Snapchat generation," the "cool kids," who grow up in this very fast-paced world with a persistent "I-don't-care" attitude and try to get as many likes as possible on their TikToks and Insta accounts.
They tap into teenagers' desires for boundary-pushing and underline a naive sense of life.
However, they do not articulate problems or provide solutions. The world reflected in the works is a sick, broken, superficial, and pornographic world - but also a world full of aesthetics.
Their photographs turn the young women into sickly dolls. They question individuality and self-determination; illnesses become fashion accessories. Intimate and vulnerable aspects of the subject's personality are used to deliver these characteristics in a condensed and intensified manner, into an unstable, insecure, inconsistent, and capricious world. Thus, the photographs appear superficial, blatant, aggressive, the people interchangeable, exhibited, devoid of individuality - yet strangely intimate and vulnerable. In the works, staging and reality blur.
