Annette Kelm

Witte de With presents a solo exhibition of new and existing works by the Berlin-based photographer Annette Kelm. This is the last installment in the series of shows-within-a-show presented within the “institutional zones” that Liam Gillick delineated with his architectural meta-structure, which has dominated the 2nd floor galleries since January.

Kelm’s photographs are at once sober and lyrical, displaying a conceptual bent and a subtle sense of humor. With intense visual clarity, she portrays objects dislocated from their usual context. Contrary to their apparent simplicity and reduced aesthetic, her images contain a wealth of references, from interior design and architecture, to Hollywood films or current day concerns with exoticism and global trade.

For this exhibition, Kelm has produced a new body of work exploring the pre-fabricated houses that emerged in Germany in the post-war years. Intrigued by the high level of ornamentation they display – quite at odds with usual notions of pre-fab architecture – Kelm photographed these houses using a 4x5 large format plate camera, a slow process with only one shot per plate. The resulting images treat each house as an object, but avoid a Becher-like categorization, capturing instead the poetic quality of these “Swiss” chalets and “Swedish” villas.

Annette Kelm
Kuratoren: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Zoe Gray