Darkside I – Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed

For sexuality and fantasy, photography is a central visual instrument: as document, stimulation, instrument of power, and as a form for artistic creation. Photography shows and stylizes pleasure and passion, voyeurism and self-representation, sexual power and consumption. Fantasies and desires form an exciting pact with photography: sexual fantasies demand representation, actively seek disclosure – and photography uses this power of (pictorial) eroticism for its own ends, to be powerful and seductive.

Darkside I is dedicated to photographs of ideal, natural, and grotesque bodies; it conceives of sexuality as a part of existence; presents photographed sexual practices, desires, and phantasms; discusses sexuality in Surrealism; reflects on reification and fetishization in sexuality; compares voyeurism and exhibitionism with one another; takes up the topics of sexuality and the body within the context of debates around gender, as well as power and the market. Throughout it is always a question of the images we make of “sexuality,” of the endless interflow of fantasies and reality in visual desire over the last one hundred years.

With works of 150 photographers, including Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, Germaine Krull, František Drtikol, Claude Cahun, von Christer Strömholm, Anders Petersen, Ed van der Elsken, Walter Chappell, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Urs Lüthi, Jürgen Klauke, Hannah Villiger, von Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Arno Nollen, Paul Armand Gette, and many others.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.

Main sponsor: George Foundation