Stefanie Moshammer . Not just your face honey

C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018
Jul 7, 2018 – Sep 22, 2018
Carnalist, 2015 © Stefanie Moshammer . From the Series I Can Be Her
© David von Becker
© David von Becker
© David von Becker
© David von Becker
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationsansicht
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationview © David von Becker

“AUSTRIA GIRL, 2411 Mason Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada”—a typewritten letter, 35 lines long, a bizarre declaration of love from a stranger. One week earlier, a man called Troy had knocked on the door of the house with this exact address, hoping to find his ex-girlfriend. Instead he encountered Stefanie Moshammer, an Austrian photographer in the US for three months working on her photo project Vegas and She (2014–15). They exchanged no more than a handful of sentences and spoke for only five minutes. This fleeting, banal encounter prompted his love letter and marked the beginning of the pictorial narration of Moshammer’s work I Can Be Her (2015).

Themes of proximity and unfamiliarity, fear and attraction, reality and fiction swirled around this man, real and also imagined, who asked her to share his life with him. Moshammer countered this fear with her photographs and embarked on a search—on the internet and on outlying streets, as well as in the desert landscapes of Las Vegas. This was her attempt to discover more about this sinister stranger and to answer his image of her with her image of him. At the same time the series also inscribes in visual form the intense exploration of subjects including love, illusion, identity, control, and surveillance.

C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationsansicht
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018, Stefanie Moshammer, Installationview © David von Becker
© David von Becker


Stefanie Moshammer’s photographs—comprised of different media—illuminate the complexity of our contemporary perception. Using existing materials, she develops her own photographs, charts pictures using Google Maps and uses film footage and video as well as fictional shots and images from her own imagination. In doing so, she creates new forms of documentation while combining fictional and narrative moments and touches on fundamental photographic themes: What is reality? What is fiction? Which truths does the photographic image convey?

Stefanie Moshammer is the winner of the 2018 C/O Berlin Talent Award. She receives a prize of 7,000 Euros and the honor of a solo exhibition at C/O Berlin, titled Stefanie Moshammer . Not just your face honey. A publication published by Spector Books in Leipzig and edited by Ann-Christin Bertrand for the C/O Berlin Foundation accompanies the exhibition, with texts by this year’s prizewinning art critic, Andreas Prinzing.

C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018 Artist Stefanie Moshammer mit Urkunde
C/O Berlin Talent Award 2018 Artist Stefanie Moshammer mit Urkunde © David von Becker
Biography

Stefanie Moshammer
was born in Vienna in 1988, where she continues to live and work. After graduating from the Fashion School Vienna, she completed her bachelor of arts in visual communication and photography at the University of Art and Design Linz as well as a course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus. Moshammer received a nomination within the Rencontres d’Arles festival, was selected as a FOAM Talent and nominated for the ING Unseen Talent Award at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines including i-DZEIT MagazinNew York MagazineFOAM Talent IssueM Le magazine du MondePurple Fashion MagazineThe GuardianDAZED, and in the most recent publications Land of Black Milk (Skinnerboox - Publishing, Jesi, 2017) and Vegas and She (2015 Fotohof edition, Salzburg, 2015) 

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Buchcover Stefanie Moshammer Not just your face honey
Book: Stefanie Moshammer–Not just your face honey

A publication published by Spector Books in Leipzig and edited by Ann-Christin Bertrand for the C/O Berlin Foundation accompanies the exhibition, with texts by this year’s prizewinning art critic, Andreas Prinzing.