SABINE FELBER
"Perlen Asiens"
Sept 10, 2007 – Sept 30, 2007
at Oliver Hofmann Schmuckräume Berlin, Berlin, Germany
room4art
presents photography and text by the artist Sabine Felber from her project "Stadt
Träume" ("City Dreams") on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific-Weeks
at Schmuckräume Berlin.
Sabine Felber takes pictures of the coincidence of places and people in cities
all over the world. Under the titel "Perlen Asiens" ("Pearls
of Asia") the exhibition will show images from the cities Beijing, Hong
Kong and Sydney.
"The German photographer Sabine Felber takes a systematic look at social living areas in the most significant international cities of the "global village," such as Hong Kong, Beijing and Sydney. Her extensive series "City Dreams" showcases cities as places where people meet, and also as places where they become lonely. It is not surprising that Sabine Felber chooses this topic: in addition to her intensive photographic work she also studied sociology in Heidelberg. And her "City Dreams" are the results of intensively researched exploration of the world's cities, but at the same time intimate and sensitive portraits of individual people in their home surroundings.
It is well known that a society is a conglomerate of individuals millions of human beings with their very own personal life stories. We associate cities with masses of people, jostling crowds and a certain hectic lifestyle. Sabine Felber's images in large cities provide portraits of individual people as individuals and also as representatives of the societies in which they live. Like her Swiss colleague Beat Streuli, Sabine Felber is interested in what moves the people in cities, including physical and psychological aspects. A major role is played by the relationships between people and those between people and their environment or architecture. Even if the human being and his/her urban architectural surroundings stand alongside each other as equals, what we see here is neither traditional portrait photography as such, nor does it present classical urban landscapes. Instead, it is a symbiosis of these two genres – a kind of psychological, contemporary portrait of a city at a certain point in time, determined by the people in it. The pictures are timeless, yet they are simultaneously an expression of a precisely chosen zeitgeist that has been captured with the help of the camera.
Sabine Felber certainly does not show typical aspects or stereotypes of cities,
and neither is she showing the spectacular, but she does show people and their
everyday lives in the context of a global city. Stories are told, even if the
individual tales are completely open with no beginning and no end – and
without any kind of pre-determined plot. Sabine Felber serves up "captured
moments," i.e. shots of moments that are actually unspectacular. Her art
is manifest in transporting precisely this sensitivity both in and through her
pictures."
(Gérard A. Goodrow in his article for "Traum & Trauma. Fotos
für die Pressefreiheit 2007")