In its third edition, the international Photography Triennial RAY 2018 presents more than 60 outstanding artists’ works of contemporary photography and related practices at more than ten venues. In collaboration with over 15 partner institutions and collections in six cities in the Rhine/Main region as well as with countless events RAY 2018 offers a summer of photographic highlights.

The curatorial concept of RAY 2018 EXTREME was developed by curators of the participating institutions and collections of photography in Frankfurt/RheinMain. This curatorial team has developed five exhibitions in which the selected artists examine different aspects of extremeness.

Technical innovations, digitalisation and globalisation, population growth, and climate change create shifts in the social and political conditions worldwide. Crises, wars, extremism, and populism shake our values, norms, and organizational infrastructures. The extreme is booming. Especially in this age of digitally circulating information and images that demand an economy of attention, the extreme triggers the desire to be captured in an image. The more extraordinary and marginal the image, the more alluring it is. The resulting images deter from the normative, and sometimes even “good taste.” They are the photographic expression of a fascination with the extraordinary, the other, the dissolution of boundaries, the artificial, the bizarre, the outermost, the shock, the accidental. But they also give witness to the beautiful, the fleeting moment, the vulnerable, and the fragile. In five exhibitions dealing with the phenomena of the extreme, the invited artists reflect upon global socio-economic transformations as well as the role and function of photography that focuses not on the norm, but on the exception.

The exhibition EXTREME. SELF presented by the Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie and the Kunstforum TU Darmstadt shows Aneta Grzeszykowska, Laís Pontes and Isabelle Wenzel who dedicate themselves to personal and imaginative aspects of self-perception, which move beyond the selfie mania.

In the exhibition EXTREME. TERRITORIES, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation shows landscapes, some of which have been turned into dystopian places through political and economic developments. Photographs presented include works by Christoph Bangert, Anne Heinlein and Göran Gnaudschun, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, Gregor Sailer and Guy Tillim.

The Fotografie Forum Frankfurt dedicates itself to ecological shifts: The exhibition EXTREME. ENVIRONMENTS brings together artists who critically examine the influence of mankind on nature in different parts of the world: Mathieu Asselin, Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg, Lois Hechenblaikner, Paula Luttringer, Pradip Malde, Gideon Mendel and Ami Vitale.

With the works of Cao Fei, Richard Mosse and Paulo Nazareth, the exhibition EXTREME. NOMADS at the MMK 1 of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst focuses on contemporary forms of nomadic existence and deals with the dissolution of boundaries in politics, economy, society, and culture in the digital age.

Drug excesses, borderline lifestyles, the under- or overrepresentation of the own body: The artists of the exhibition EXTREME. BODIES at the Museum Angewandte Kunst—Antoine d’Agata, Jamie Brunskill, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Martin Liebscher, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Boris Mikhailov and Carolin Saage—explore photographic representations of body and identity that filter out the extreme from the visual white noise.

As part of the RAY 2018 exhibition programme the RAY 2018 Partner Projects present their own exhibitions, which broaden the scope of the theme EXTREME with multi-layered perspectives. RAY 2018 PLUS informs about further independent photography exhibitions taking place in the Rhine/Main region during the Triennial.

For the first time, RAY opens with a four-day Festival programme: from May 24–27 photography fans, experts as well as artists are invited to Frankfurt to explore the medium of photography and topics surrounding the RAY 2018 theme EXTREME.

RAY 2018 Curators: Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation), Peter Gorschlüter (MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main), Alexandra Lechner (Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie), Celina Lunsford (Fotografie Forum Frankfurt), Matthias Wagner K (Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main)

RAY 2018 Opening: May 23, 7pm, Opening of five locations in Frankfurt
RAY 2018 Festival: May 24–27, Artist talks, panel discussions, workshops and more surrounding the medium of photography

MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main
MMK 2
Taunustor 1
60310 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

ray2018.de