About

The exhibition invites to reflect on ritual as a given, and as a metaphor in its relationship
to the work of art, specifically in the form of photography. To begin with - as famously
formulated by Walter Benjamin - the work of art emerges from the ritual. The oldest works
of art fulfilled a ritual function. These objects were a direct and central component of once
magical, later religious traditions, customs and rites. It was only with the invention of
a means of reproducing them with photography, that the artwork gained its independence and
freed itself from its “parasitic existence in ritual”, as …