POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2025

Berlin. From September 11 to 14, 2025, international galleries will present modern and contemporary art at the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair. Thomas Kellner, an important figure in contemporary photographic art, will be represented with his contact sheets of monumental architecture—including, of course, the Brandenburg Gate. Three times, in fact.

Every September, Berlin Art Week kicks off the new art season. POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair has been an official partner of Berlin Art Week since 2014 and is the only art fair during Berlin Art Week to bring together over 70 international galleries from 19 countries, presenting the most important contemporary positions beyond traditional categories. Over 100 major museums, collections, galleries, and project spaces participate in the Berlin Art Week festival, turning the German capital into the epicenter of contemporary art. Important institutions such as the Neue Nationalgalerie, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Berlinische Galerie come together to offer a diverse program of special exhibitions, award ceremonies, and more. The POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2025 will take place at Berlin-Tempelhof Airport Hangar 7. This year, the focus is on galleries from Japan.

Internationally renowned photographic artist Thomas Kellner is represented by the Hamburg-based VisuleX Gallery for Photography with several photographic artworks. In keeping with its Berlin location, the gallery for photographic art is presenting three images of the Brandenburg Gate: one from 1998 – an early work by Kellner – then a work from 2006 from the Tango Metropolis series and a later one from 2018 from the Black & White series. The photographic artworks exhibited at the fair thus allow visitors to trace the various phases of Kellner's work and understand the evolution of his iconic contact sheet process.

Before we get to the Berlin image from 1998, we need to go back to Paris in 1997. That year, Thomas Kellner had the opportunity to photograph the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Initially, he planned to further develop his usual pinhole camera technique and capture the Eiffel Tower with a larger, homemade apparatus. However, due to a lack of time, he decided to travel with an analog SLR camera—and in 1997, he began his first attempts at contact printing as a draft with the Eiffel Tower. Later, contact printing established itself for Kellner as a separate artistic medium with artistic potential.
Kellner's Brandenburg Gate from 1998 is a work from this experimental phase, in which the photo artist explored the potential of the multiperspectivity and rasterization of the process. The image can thus be understood as a path or stage toward later contact sheets. In addition, in the Brandenburg Gate from 1998, the motif was not captured as usual on the basis of a 35mm negative film, but rather on slide film. This material leads to the particularly cool colors and sharp details of the images. The lack of a zoom function on the lens and the position from which the photograph was taken mean that the motif is repeated several times in the image. The effect of the image thus ranges from multiple views to fragmentation and dissolution.

The VisuleX Gallery for Photography in Berlin is the only gallery to present these early, entirely analog prints, which were made between 1998 and 2002 from cross-developed slide films. The prints are being exhibited exclusively for the fair and are available for purchase.

As the name of the series, Tango Metropolis, clearly indicates, Kellner brings the Berlin monument to life in this series of works. Whereas the Brandenburg Gate from 1998 appears cool, fragmented, and dissolving, the 2006 version seems to vibrate. In this work, Kellner transfers the motif into his iconic contact sheet format, which he had already been developing for several years at that point. In the method developed by the artist himself, using 35mm film negatives individual shots of the motif are defined in a specific position in the overall context of the work each time the camera is triggered. 
The contact sheet not only highlights the materiality of the analogue medium, but also uses it as a structure to give familiar motifs a new, unfamiliar expression. This new type of composition and the associated visual effect are made possible by working with a reflex camera with a very long focal length. Using the contact sheet process, the artist now assembles the Berlin Moment from 360 individual shots into a dynamic overall image, thus expressing the change behind the otherwise rigid and steadfast monument. At the same time, it marks an important change in the photographic artist's technique.

While the dancing Brandenburg Gate from 2006 appears lively and electric, Kellner's 2018 version conveys a sense of cool uncertainty. This is partly due to the black-and-white color scheme that characterizes the works in the Black & White series, but also to Kellner's specific composition of the individual images. While in Tango Metropolis the Brandenburg Gate is set in motion by rhythmic shifts in perspective without losing its uniformity, in this 2018 version it seems to be faltering. It does not appear vibrant, but rather cubically composed and threatened with collapse. Such characterizations of architecture can be found in several works in the series, and as Kellner thus makes clear, the contact sheet process enables a wide range of visual effects. What connects both, however, is the technical precision for which Kellner is known.

At the Berlin art fair, galleries have the important task of introducing contemporary art to an international audience through selected positions. The Hamburg-based photography gallery VisuleX Gallery for Photography is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and is presenting four international photography artists at POSITIONS 2025 to mark the occasion. The exhibition features Japanese photographic artist PHOTOGRAPHERHAL, Karsten Januschke and Thomas Kellner from Germany, and Maciej Markowicz from Poland and Germany. The four artists represent important and diverse positions in contemporary art, but what unites them is their exploration of space, structure, perception, and memory.

Thomas Kellner will be present on Wednesday and Thursday.

10 years - Photography inbetween architecture, landscape and time
Contributing artists: Hal, Karsten Januschke, Thomas Kellner, Maciej Markowicz

POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair
September 11 to 14, 2025
Flughafen Tempelhof Hangar 7

VisuleX Gallery for Photography
Loogestrasse 6
20249 Hamburg
+49 151 2712 5471
info@visulex.net

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