Cold Lens as a Filter

This catalogue, in digital format, is a search for traces by a visual artist who explores the material dimensions of photography in expansive mixed-media installations. Cold Lens as a Filter brings together Jana Müller’s works from 2001 to 2023 and makes the complexity of her artistic research visible and tangible through various forms of media.

In her email correspondence with the New Zealand artist Matthew Cowan, which took place during the Corona pandemic, the artist provides insights into her photographic working methods. She outlines a practice that combines photography as a communicative and documentary medium with the process of archiving and its artistic translation.

She documents, among other things, legal exhibits in the evidence rooms of cities in Germany, re-enacts the police search of her parents’ house 13 years after the actual event in 1990 and artistically examines a playground with its special history as a background. For her, the use of glass as a working material is both functionally and conceptually an important filter for historical aesthetics, temporary architectures and the absent as information. Within these strategies, Müller’s photographic practice is an inventory of real and fictional events that address claims of the legal and artistic truth of objects.