Overview
Orejarena & Stein's photographic and filmic works deal with simulation techniques and narratives of disinformation. The artist duo Andrea Orejarena (*1994, Colombia), cognitive scientist and photographer, and Caleb Stein (*1994, UK), documentary photographer, are known for conceptual documentary projects that deal with individual perception and the collective construction of reality. Her artistic archive reveals a repertoire of image types, codes, patterns and motifs that manifest a dynamic typology and constantly growing visual world of visual disinformation and simulation fantasies.
As a growing distrust in the distinction between reality and fiction characterizes our present, the duo has been exploring social media and photography since 2020. The result is an initial archive of over 2,000 photographs and current image forms that manifest the influence of conspiracy narratives on American society and individual perception.
Orejarena and Stein have developed this examination of images, some of which question our relationship to reality with a wink, others with a paranoid gaze, into their own photographic concept, which loosely follows an atlas of conspiracy-theory locations in the USA. Their series American Glitch documents the landscapes of the USA based on viral imagery as a simulation.
Since their project Long Time No See (2015-2020), the duo has been working on the pressing question of what role photography can play in the interplay between perception and imagination today. Long Time No See was created together with young Vietnamese artists and veterans near Hanoi and traces the artistic examination of today's memories and consequences of the Vietnam-American War. In poetic portraits and landscape views, Long Time No See shows a visual search for traces of the nuances of dissonant historiographies and image forms between documentation and subjective perception. The project critically reflects on American conventions of war representation and tests collaborative photographic forms. The sound installation War Words brings competing historical (dis)information campaigns into a dialog and opens up a perceptual space between local mythologies, military tactics and emotional media impact.
Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich (Curator Haus der Photographie), Tactics And Mythologies is the first exhibition of the new exhibition and event series Viral Hallucinations, which will address the role of photographic and AI-generated images in the growing social influence of conspiracy theories from 2024 to 2026. The series is supported by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.
