In a way, the shadow stands at the beginning of art history. In the ancient tradition of Pliny the Elder, it is the daughter of the potter Butades who traces the shadow outline of her lover’s head with a charcoal pencil, thus creating the first image. The famous allegory of the cave by the Greek philosopher Plato, on the other hand, separates the shadow images in the dark cave that obscure reality from the bright light of knowledge and thus the literally shadowy existence from the truly illuminated one. The dubious, potentially sinister aspect accompanied the shadow for centuries before Romanticism discovered its positive dimension and linked the shadow with the psyche. In Adelbert von Chamisso’s fairy tale Peter Schlemihl, for example, the loss of the shadow is equated with the loss of the soul. Even though shadows have played a role in the repertoire of painting since the early modern period, it was not until the 19th century and the invention of photography and film that they became an essential pictorial element.

Based on around 40 international positions, the exhibition traces for the first time in a German museum the emancipation of the shadow as an image-producing, yet always media-reflexive theme within contemporary art. It examines the spectrum of shadow worlds, ranging from the existential to the threatening to the political. The shadow is where the absent and the present meet. It symbolically and immaterially refers to the existence of the material world and at the same time also contains its extinction. It belongs to the body, from which it is at the same time always at a distance. It is a trace that, like photography, functions as an index and at the same time is a projection surface that claims its own reality. In this context, the shadow can be read on the one hand as a metaphor for the crisis of the subject, but also as an important indicator of a reality beyond the superficially visible.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (selection): Vito Acconci, David Claerbout, Marlene Dumas, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jenna Gribbon, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, William Kentridge, Astrid Klein, Farideh Lashai, Gerhard Richter, Regina Silveira, Javier Téllez, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Sue Webster/Tim Noble.