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.
