BLEACHED

In the summer of 2017, more than 800 neo-Nazis gathered in Berlin Spandau to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Rudolf Heß' death. The former deputy to Adolf Hitler was found guilty at the Nuremberg trials and in 1987, after serving 40 years of his lifelong sentence, took his own life in Spandau Prison (Kriegsverbrechergefängnis Spandau).

The memorial march took place in Wilhelmstraße, where the now-demolished Prison was located. In defiance of the government ban on displaying Nazi symbols in Germany, the participants of the march carried black-white-red Deutsches Reich flags, symbolizing their National Socialist and anti-democratic beliefs.

Within this charged atmosphere, Kobe-born and Berlin-based artist Satoshi Fujiwara set out to capture the event from up close: Disguised as an Asian tourist and armed only with his camera, he approached the neo-Nazis at close range to document the spectacle. These photographs became the foundation for his Bleached-series. Fujiwara meticulously edited them and removed any color and symbolic elements from banners, flags, clothing and Skin of the participants. What remains are bleached white canvases and textures.

Fujiwara’s work exists within the interplay of two seemingly paradoxical elements: While the journalistic technique of on-site documentation is crucial to his work in order to experience the spectacle and bear witness to the event, nor does he hide the fact that the images he presents are manipulated. In times of deep fakes, most viewers might be aware that photographic images have never been a particularly trustworthy source of information, much less so edited images. However, such common understanding does not stop from feeling a certain immediacy resonating from Fujiwara’s images: stylistic cropping brings the marching crowd extremely close to the viewer, further emphasized due to high resolution and the sharpness of the images.

Satoshi Fujiwara (b. 1984, Kobe, Japan) is a Berlin-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, installation, collage, and video. His work critically interrogates the visual and linguistic codes that shape society, diverging from conventional art discourses to deconstruct the politics of contemporary imagery. Through the heterogeneous definition of his visual language, Fujiwara creates a new emerging lexicon. His works have been presented at international institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Canada; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE; Fondazione Prada, Italy; La Boverie, Belgium;21_21 Design Sight, Japan; and Deutsche Oper Berlin, Germany, among others.

Sophie-Gips-Höfe (red corridor)

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