Man

Photography – 2007
C-Print
86.4 × 105 cm (34 × 41 in)

The artwork Man shows a haunting and provocative scene in Berlin-Mitte. A young woman, almost completely undressed except for a pair of red panties, sits on the back of a stone sculpture of an equally undressed man, the Money Counter (1912), created by Ernst Wenck. The woman, who has painted her body gray, lovingly stages a kind of rendezvous and dinner, whereby the lifeless stone man is involuntarily drawn into this intimate scene.

The money counter, which otherwise functions as a silent symbol of another era, becomes a symbol of social change through this staging. The woman’s embrace of the male body makes him appear like a figure from a modern myth – a kind of King Kong who loses his role as a dominant lover and suddenly finds himself in a passive position. The classic distribution of roles is thus questioned and reversed. The sculpture, which once symbolized strength and control, mutates through the staged intimacy into a threatening but at the same time helpless lover, reflecting the shift in power relations in modern times.