Kira Bunse - Przystanek Woodstock

8 July—26 August 2017
Opening: Saturday, 8 July 2017, 6—9 pm

With the exhibition Przystanek Woodstock at ITALIC, Bunse shows selected works from a series that was created in Summer 2013 at the free rock and independent music festival of the same name in the Polish town of Kostrzyn nad Odrą.

The analogue black-and-white photographs, consistently printed in the same portrait or landscape format, appear as snapshots of the seemingly carefree activities of the young festival attendees. Alternating between documentary observation and a conscious aestheticization of the subjects, the images point to the special relationship between the photographer and the protagonists she has discovered on location. Supported by the social dynamics of the music festival, Bunse succeeds in capturing very special, intimate moments in this liberated atmosphere.

In the tradition of Diane Arbus or Nan Goldin, her images of the young people at the festival can also be seen as social portraits, in which those who are generally not perceived as such become the main actors.

Text: Philipp Fürnkäs

Kira Bunse, Przystanek Woodstock, Installation view, 2017, Italic Berlin

Kira Bunse, Przystanek Woodstock, Installation view, 2017, Italic Berlin

Kira Bunse, Przystanek Woodstock, Installation view, 2017, Italic Berlin

Kira Bunse - Traveling Light
16 November 2019—18 Januar 2020
Opening: Saturday, 16 November 2019, 7—10 pm

Traveling Light is her second exhibition at ITALIC. The photographs are analogue; in fast fashion she usually has to work digitally, for editorials or free works she carries an analogue camera with her. Kira Bunse has selected photographs from the last two years and located them spatially and temporally in the title, from Los Angeles 2017 to São Paulo 2019. All the works shown are hand prints directly from the negative.

Kira Bunse looks into living and working spaces, and out into the stagings of human hands that we call nature. People can hardly be seen, their traces can. They themselves are far away in the distance, appear briefly, disappear in a bay, escape in a car. They are excerpts, snapshots, taken on journeys. The pictures open up an ambivalent tension: were the motifs deliberately sought or do we see snapshots along the way? Casualness? - there's no getting lost: there's nothing incidental here: Kira Bunse's gaze is precise.

Kira Bunse looks at arrangements in space, at geometries, objects and colours, the pictures radiate a calm, a calming, an ingenious coordinated palette, not too colourful, not too pale, not too sharp and not too soft, she sets the frame, pushes the trigger, there is no wrong moment, coincidence and surprise already, often perhaps only in the laboratory when she examines her yield; but she knows that poison will not be present, because when and where she pushes the trigger: her view of the motif is always a loving one.

Text: Andreas Reihse

Kira Bunse, Traveling Light, Installation view, 2019/20, Italic Berlin