CARSTEN RABE
“Im gleißenden Licht”
(17th August – 11th October 2024)
Exhibition poster “Im gleißenden Licht” by Carsten Rabe, Design by K. Nöbel, 2024.
Carsten Rabe, “Im gleißenden Licht”, Digital print framed Edition: 1/5 + 2 AP, 2017, 30x40cm.
Informations about the artist and exhibition
Carsten Rabe (*1975) is a Hamburg-based curator and art photographer. Since 2000, he has presented his photographs nationally and internationally. His documentary photography explores the beauty of the everyday, reflecting human actions and living environments.
The exhibition “In the Blazing Light (Im gleißenden Licht)” presents the latest image cycle by Carsten Rabe. Through the layering of photographs, Rabe aims to create a fictional narrative related to the exhibition’s title. The images are displayed in various formats—color and black-and-white, framed and as posters. At first glance, the arrangement appears disordered and playful.
However, upon closer inspection of this visual world, relationships between the photographs emerge. These imagined connections highlight that it is not the individual image that takes center stage, but rather the overall arrangement. Various image aesthetics and contents intertwine into interconnected narrative threads. The exhibition title, referencing a biblical quote, evokes the image of a person standing in the blazing light of the sunset—a moment when light transitions into darkness, a moment of great longing and beauty before the onset of night.
This moment raises questions: What do we leave behind, what will the night bring, and what will endure until the next sunrise?
The exhibition features three layers: framed photographs, poster-like decollages, and large-format background prints of sunsets in detailed sections—yellow, orange, red, and purple, radiating in oversized zooms. Carsten Rabe plays with this visual triad and the mechanisms of photography. The framed photographs depict views of everyday life—observations of our world, including motifs of construction and decay, architecture and landscapes, with solitude and silence, where the human figure, placed within the arrangement, serves as a silent protagonist in the overall narrative.
The faded decollages are graphic remnants of others’ creations, once placed in public spaces—now worn and faded, but briefly revived in the moment before their final disappearance.
Photographed and archived—quotes of the world.
The four sunsets show screenshots from phone displays, reflecting the imagery of social media, an everyday component of our image consumption. Following the same impulse as photography, the screenshot captures a moment of image appropriation. In the exhibition, these image fragments serve as metaphors and staging elements. The cropped and pixelated sunsets act as background noise, visually complementing the theme. The image cycle is a reminiscence of past decades. While the world seems to linger in the blazing light of the sunset, the utopian light overshadows the ideas of the 20th century—the golden 80s, the illusions of the 90s, and the hopes of the new millennium. Fully immersed in the beauty of the moment, we stroll indifferently through the Anthropocene and gaze with open eyes at the swan song of modernity. It is a multifaceted era—filled with societal ideas about prosperity and research, science and religion. Longing for a better tomorrow, moments of upheaval, stagnation, renewal, beauty, and ugliness—a shimmering in the residual light.
The photographs reflect the morbid decay of the beautiful new world. Blinded, we blink melancholically at the sparkling light of the evening’s color play, which announces the approaching darkness. In harmony with reality—standing still, motionless—we are enchanted by the poetry of the moment and filled with the beauty of the blazing light in the firmament.
We are accompanied by all these images. Images images images—daily consumed, creating their own concealed narrative of the world. Photography has long ceased to be a representation of reality, even though this is still suggested to us daily. In a continuous stream, images with manipulated content flood us, skillfully reinterpreting the real world and thus creating their own fictional portrayal of reality.
Carsten Rabe’s photographs are purely documentary, not staged or digitally manipulated. Part of his artistic practice involves archiving. This, in turn, forms the basis for the image cycles, in which the archived moments are recited. The photos show people, places, situations, and things—as if placed in space and time. The when and where are not crucial; it is about the snapshot, the possibility of capturing time. The photos created in this process are stored and feed a continuously expanding collection.
For presentation in exhibitions, photo books, and catalogs, Carsten Rabe works with these archives. In assembling an image cycle, the focus is on examining contemporary themes and engaging with and exploring current issues. Flipping through the archives repeatedly reveals abstract connections between the photographs. By linking individual images into a narrative context, a visual tension arises, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves in the artist’s thought world and the imaginary references and connections of the individual images and their contents in relation to the thematic overall narrative.
Welcome to the world—Welcome to the Blazing Light / Im gleißenden Licht!
– Original text by Carsten Rabe / proofread by Josephine Müller
Carsten Rabe, “Im gleißenden Licht”, Digitalprint gerahmt Auflage: 1/5 + 2 AP, 2017, 60x80cm.
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