Carsten Becker

Carsten Becker studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 1994 to 1999. The conceptual artist is a two-time winner of the German Study Award (Körber Foundation).

His works have been shown internationally at the Architekturzentrum Wien, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Haunt / frontviews, Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, Athens and Paradiso Amsterdam. Carsten Becker lives and works in Berlin.

How does history affect the present? In his serial work Agfacolor, made from photo-historical image material, Carsten Becker refers to the importance of information and its political, opinion-forming function of shaping public perceptions. In this way, he addresses the mechanisms of power and manipulation of images, which have recently been increasingly discussed again with a focus on the distortion and displacement of the supposed mass media expression of reality and their conception of it. On view are speculative photo excerpts from colour photographs of German propaganda soldiers. The former dangers of influence and control appear again as close as hardly ever before. With his abstract narrative style, Becker not only opens up a space of interpretation variants, but at the same time questions the claim and expectations of the depicting (information) medium today, which is subject to an increasing loss of control.