Antje Hanebeck (born in Braunschweig in 1968), master-class graduate at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and currently assistant professor at the Chair of Photography, proves to be an unusual chronicler of contemporary urban phenomena. The subject of architectural innovation, encompassing as it does buildings celebrated in our era which at the same time mirror the logistics specific to them, informs on an elemental plane the aesthetic research conducted by the author in that it is the red thread running through her oeuvre.

Photographs of architecture are legion and go back to the beginnings of the medium; however, Hanebeck is not concerned with the documentary approach. On the contrary, she uses her motif as the starting-point for complex aesthetic reflection, which is transformed into image through, and by the agency of, photography.

At first glance, these shots provide tours through German cities, which have a tendency to preen themselves on their contemporary architect-designed buildings. The photographs stop where new future monuments have settled, where the language of signs signalises the urban situation. For instance, we might be in Berlin and encounter Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Gehry's DZ Bank and Murphy/Jahns's Sony Centre. In Munich, on the other hand, it might be BMW World (Coop Himmelb(l)au), the Highlight Towers (Murphy/Jahn), the Herz Jesu Church (Allmann Sattler Wappner) and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Braunfels). But the spotlight here is not just on metropolises. In fringe areas, too, iconic monuments are springing up to vie for the photographer's attention, including the Phaeno Science Centre by Zaha Hadid in Wolfsburg and the Neues Museum in Nürnberg by Volker Staab.

Hanebeck's work is revealed as 'site-related' rather than 'site-specific'. She is not so much concerned with the buildings as with the aura that unexpectedly attends them, with a very particular form of aesthetic that thrusts into space to be physically articulated.

Tortuously yet seductively, they demonstrate the fusion of the inner and the external worlds, metaphorically visualising time itself, so to speak, as the symbolic implications of yesterday, today and tomorrow. It is not coincidental, therefore, that Hanebeck - although thoroughly versed in cutting-edge photographic techniques and technologies - is also oriented towards historic printing processes and photographic translation - as vehicles for defamiliarisation, illusion or, perhaps more aptly put: revelation. The most modern of structures are absorbed into a visual interpretation that lends them a quasi 'antiquarian' character.

A photograph opens up a view of the present as if it were already witnessing history. The author of these photographs is accompanied by a sleepwalker's unerring instinct for the recondite qualities inherent in colossal buildings and their enigmatic aura. The human being does not at first play a dominant role. He acts in the background as the causative principle, as the creator in the Piranesi manner of these art worlds in which he only occasionally and surprisingly surfaces.

In Hanebeck's hands, the specific motif as such is undergoing a process of abstraction that is increasingly wider in scope. Thus architecture, as the mother of all arts since time immemorial, is made memorably present so that the viewer is aware that this is so. Viewers of these pictures may roam back and forth between the various planes, presumably unable to distinguish between reality and illusion. However, the trajectories that Hanebeck suggests for the imagination in her photoworks are what ultimately count.

Under the patronage of the Consulate-General
of the Federal Republic of Germany, Milan