SALZBURG.- The exhibition at FOTOHOF features a topical project developed by Berlin artist Tobias Zielony (born in Wuppertal in 1973) in Ramallah, in autumn 2013. It is a photographic study of the extremely precarious political situation in Palestine. This is the artist’s first explicit landscape work, and it is all about the West Bank as a place where conflict rages over land, water, and infrastructure, but also questions of identity.

At Tobias Zielony’s request, Cairo-based German-Egyptian video artist and political activist Philip Rizk (born in Limassol, Cyprus, in 1983) has contributed an essay to accompany the photographs which has been incorporated into the exhibition as a literary work in its own right, expressing more explicitly what is intimated more subtly in Zielony’s images: namely, seeking out the stories of individual people inseparably linked with a form of the neoliberal colonisation that individualises the region’s inhabitants through consumerism and loans, undermining any sense of political solidarity. Which is why the exhibition by Tobias Zielony with a textual work by Philip Rizk is entitled A Colonial Landscape.

Tobias Zielony has always expressed his artistic interest by staging roles and correlating his protagonists within the space in which they find themselves. In his 24 large-format wall-mounted photographs the artist is now presenting a selection of his powerful image compositions. While certainly characterised by a documentary approach, their narrative elements are always understood as an associative device aimed at creating a subjectively shaded, autonomous image.

Take, for instance, the attentive face of a Palestinian schoolgirl during a science experiment involving scorpions under fluorescent black lighting: it is transformed into an almost spectral portrait which, given the context of the cycle, can also be seen metaphorically as a psychotic state of instable politics.

Like Zielony, Philip Rizk represented Germany at this year’s Venice Biennale. With his diverse oeuvre he has made a name for himself as a political activist exploring highly politicised questions as part of various artists’ collectives as well as his own life story, addressing a number of these issues also through videos.

For his work at the FOTOHOF the artist has turned his encounters with inhabitants of the West Bank and his own personal experiences, jotted down in diary-like notes, into a work of literature. These essays are as poetic as they are explicitly enlightening, and he subsequently developed them as a sound installation for the gallery space. There they unfold in their own distinct way, additionally providing visitors to the exhibition with an opportunity to absorb Zielony’s large-format wall-mounted works in unison.