Wendy Ewald 'Secret Games' - Collaboration with Children
With »Secret Games« the Gallery Parrotta presents the first exhibition of the 1951 born American photographer, conceptual and video artist Wendy Ewald in Germany. For more than thirty years Wendy Ewald gives cameras to children, to work together with them, documenting and bringing out their dreams, fears and experiences of their daily life in pictures and words.
As the project of her life, Wendy Ewald travelled around the world, to take pictures with children from different cultural and social backgrounds. Our stereotypical perceptions of childhood and innocent eyes are totally taken away through their pictures in one click. In a merciless, intensive and from time to time unsettling poetical way, the children show in their photographs their environment and put themselves into the pictures to bring their own meaning into it. It is the interchanging of position of power that makes the work of Wendy Ewald so deeply intensive and powerful. She creates situations to bring to the surface what attracts the children and what seemed to them important enough to tell. Therefore we see kaleidoscopical portraits of childhood, made of turbulent, dreamt, thoughtful and melancholical moments between reality and fiction, which evoke affections of closeness but on the other hand are inapproachable.
Wendy Ewald has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She was also a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School from 2000-2002. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the George Eastman House in Rochester, Nederlands Foto Institute in Rotterdam, the Fotomuseum in Wintherthur, Switzerland, and the Corcoran Gallery of American Art among others. Her work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. She has published ten books, her fifth, a retrospective documenting her projects entitled Secret Games, was published by Scalo in 2000. Two books on recent projects were published in 2005. A third, To The Promised land was published in 2006 to accompany an outdoor installation in Margate, England commissioned by ArtAngel. She is currently teaching at Amherst College. She also remains an artist in residence at the John Hope Franklin Center and senior research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.


Toshiya Momose 'Stills'
With the exhibition »Stills« the Gallery Parrotta shows in Stuttgart and Berlin a first comprehensive range of works of the Japanese photographer Toshiya Momose (*1968) in Germany. Always from the perspective of a visitor, traveller and silent observer Momose takes pictures of metropolises like Havanna, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York and - newer works - of cultivated landscapes in Germany. Throughout the work are desert- scenes, which evoke impressions of abandonment. Therefore the manifestation of time stays in focus of the artistic idea from Toshiya Momose. In the sense of the »dialectical image« of Walter Benjamin he creates configurations inside the process of history, which single out images of the flow of time, by underlining cognition in an active fixed moment and so refer to not lived reality. To get those glimpses of compressed time, Toshiya Momose waits frequently many hours behind his camera. He catches in one picture the instant of emptiness and abandonment in usually bustling places. Through that his photographs seem to breath a fearful silence - a vacuum even inside highly artificial spaces getting generated, and reflecting about caducity and death.

Toshiya Momose is professor for Photography at Kyushu Sangyo University of Fukuoka/Japan and from 2006 to 2007 he was guest professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. His photographs have been shown widely in Japan and in 2002 he received the Ken Domon Photography Award. About his photographic work have been published a range of books, latest 'Never Land my Havanna' (2006). His artwork is further included in private and public collections like the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art, the Ken Domon Museum of Photography and the Museum of Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka.