Arne Schmitt

Reason
15/02 – 19/04/2020

Arne Schmitt’s photographic works explore architecture and city planning in keeping with historical and societal points of view.
The two videos that form the starting point of Schmitt’s exhibition ‘Reason’ in the Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie examine the history and current situation of the city of Ludwigshafen under the influence of BASF: ‘City-Counter City’ is a juxtaposition of the neighbouring cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen and based on the 1928 text of the same name by Ernst Bloch. ‘The Hot Peace’, a film essay produced in the 1960s by BASF, makes the global market economy tangible as a historically evolved ideology.
Arne Schmitt contrasts this piece with his most recent work, ‘Signs of the Times. On the History of an Ahistorial Area named Parkstadt Schwabing’. It is concerned with a portrait of an office and service-sector district in the north of Munich that was planned in the 1990s. Schmitt based his work on archival photographs and quotations from the press and construction documents in addition to his own photographs of street and company signs. The piece offers insights into the volatile history of this district, revealing strategies of neoliberal urban development. 
Arne Schmitt (born 1984 in Mayen, lives and works in Cologne) studied photography in Leipzig and Brussels. In 2016, he was the holder of the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship and was awarded the 2018 Art Prize of the Böttcherstraße.

A book accompanying the exhibition will be published by Spector Books.

^{Exhibitions views ©Nikola Haubner}

^{Copyrights: © Arne Schmitt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020}