(Article originally published in Italian)
With « Tactics & Mythologies: Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein », hosted at the Phoxxi-Casa della Fotografia Temporanea space from 7 September to 26 January 2025, the Deichtorhallen are launching a new cycle of exhibitions that explores the connections between contemporary photography, the visual culture of online communities and conspiracy theories that are so widespread and impactful in our time. « Viral Hallucinations » is the title of this new project that focuses on the different documentary strategies in our post-truth era , addressing the hybrid online spaces that have quickly become the primary source of information for billions of people.
The first solo exhibition in Europe of the New York duo Andrea Orejarena (1994) and Caleb Stein (1994) presents in this sense in Hamburg photographic and cinematic works that address the practices of simulation and the narratives of disinformation online. The two artists are known for their conceptual-documentary projects on individual perception and the collective construction of reality, published, among others, by the «New York Times», «The Guardian», «iD Vice», «Vogue Italia» and «Wallpaper*». They began their research in 2020 by starting to explore the galaxy of social media and the way in which the photographic medium appears in it , the fundamental role it plays in the culture of the artificial image.
The result of these first four years of work is an archive of over 1,500 reproductions in which the influence of conspiracy narratives is evident in the specific case of the perception of the individual within American society. The two main projects presented in «Tactics & Mythologies», the installation «American Glitch» and the work «Long Time No See», respectively deal with today's American reality and the imagery inherited from the shared national past of the Vietnam War. If the first delves into the undergrowth of photographic narratives of alternative facts in the alleged places of conspiracy theory and seeking continuous references to the American photographic history on the road, the second touches a very sensitive nerve in the recent history of the nation, taking an interest in the role that photography can play today in the interaction between perception and imagination . Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich , the exhibition opens to poetic portraits and landscape views, focusing on the dissonant visual forms between subjective understanding and documentation.
