Ricarda Roggan

Old East German tables and chairs in isolated rooms; abandoned claustrophobic brick rooms or attic spaces, which seem to be changing from one state into another. These are some of the motifs in Ricarda Roggan's conceptual photographs. In her intense, stark and sophisticated still life images, Roggan transcends documentary to investigate connections between memory and spatial constructions. She carefully prepares and even revamps her spaces, making every new detail visible for the photographs to come alive. Her images do not tell stories, but are suggestive of the multiple histories surrounding the collapse of the former DDR, where objects and architectures live on as obsolete memorial sculptures after the failure of the political system. The series Garage (2008) shows full-frontal images of sole car wrecks, fiercely lit up. The cars will never gain new life, but are left as anthropomorphized victims of unknown events, filled with human features and emotion, which convey a disturbing atmosphere of death, trauma and possibility.