BERLIN.- Galerie Springer Berlin announces its next exhibition with young photographer Sebastian Wells. Since 2016, he has travelled to all Olympic Games as an accredited photographer. He will therefore not be present at the opening on 20 February, as he will be at the Olympic Games in Milan/Cortina. A short statement from the artist will be read out at the opening and welcome reception. In February, the book »ARENA Take 1: Facing the Spectacle« will be published by Spector Books.

We invite you to a performative lecture and book presentation of ‘ARENA’ with Sebastian Wells at the gallery on 27 February at 7 p.m. The books can be purchased and signed during the event.

In the series ARENA I and ARENA II, Sebastian Wells examines the Olympic Games as a global mass spectacle and questions the media, spatial and social mechanisms that shape this event. His work deliberately opposes heroic, nationally charged visual traditions of sport and draws attention to the structures that give rise to perception, attention and meaning in the first place.

ARENA I shows the Olympic Games as a product legitimised by images, in which athletes, officials, fans – and also photographers – become part of a predetermined order. Instead of reproducing medal moments, Wells directs his camera at peripheral areas, architectural spaces and seemingly incidental situations. By consciously playing with the constraints of predefined photo positions, he creates images in which human imperfection and everyday life shine through the mask of function, and in which it is not the action that defines the image, but the image itself that determines what is perceived as action.

ARENA II extends this critique beyond the duration of the Games. Between March and September 2024, Wells documented the Place de la Concorde in Paris before, during and after its transformation into an ‘Olympic Park’ with four sports arenas. Hundreds of chronologically arranged black-and-white photographs depict the chaotic yet everyday coexistence of tourists, businesspeople, homeless individuals, workers, objects, and architectures in fleeting observations. Through the constant act of walking as a directionless crossing of public space—a movement that eludes the pre-staged gaze of Olympic image production—images of chance encounters in street traffic emerge, almost imperceptibly blending with images of the equally bustling crowds of spectators and athletes moving across the square during the competitions.

Sebastian Wells (born 1996) is a photographer and member of the OSTKREUZ agency. In his photographic practice, he explores power, space and media staging, particularly in the context of major global events. In 2022, he founded the magazine Solomiya with Vsevolod Kazarin. He lives in Berlin.