Δ Life with Le Corbusier

Families stroll through the well-tended park, street merchants offer their goods for sale, at the university a frenzy of activity prevails and the buildings of the capitol city Chandigarh, a city with the highest quality of life in India and also endearingly referred to as “City Beautiful”, are enthroned like sculptures on the horizon. The city experiment began after India gained its independence. With the planning of the new capital city of the state of Punjab, a long-cherished plan came to fulfilment for the internationally renowned French architect Le Corbusier. Here, in 1951, he was able to realise the “functional city” which had until then remained confined to the drawing board: he separated residential areas from places of work and located green zones between an austere network of street grids. In addition, important monumental structures belonging to his late works were developed in the administrative district.

The urban portrait of the photographer and ethnologist Bärbel Högner shows how spirited Indian everyday life has found its place among the architectures of modernity marked as they are by concrete facades and angular forms.

The picture series was developed in analogue, in middle-format and comprises seventy photographs. Text panels and charts elucidate the emergence of Chandigarh. A volume of photographic work is currently in planning.

schließen

Δ Skin Marks – Body Pictures

The exhibition “Skin Marks – Body Pictures”, on display in the main building of the museum from the 29th April, 2006 to September, 2007 shows the human skin as a projection surface for artistic design. Over the last thirty or so years, a renewed general interest in body styling can be determined among the various cultures of the West.

Body modifications comprise a whole range of practices to which belong branding, scarification, implantation, deformations of the skull, the foot binding, beauty operations and body painting. With the discovery of the body as a bearer of sign languages signifying existential orientation and individuality, body interventions have recently experienced renewed acceptance. Especially among the various groupings within youth culture, piercing and tattooing can be expressions of personality but also of group membership. In this connection, recourse to “tribal” models of non-European cultures is especially popular, even though their social and cultural contexts have, for the most part, not been assimilated by such groups.

The exhibition displays examples of tattoos, decorative scarification and body painting from the oceans of Asia, Africa, South America and Europe. The exhibition seeks to describe these in their respective mythological, religious and social contexts. The exhibits, the majority of which are drawn from collections belonging to various Frankfurt museums, are supplemented by an extraordinary range of photographic material.

Five additional museums in the Rhine-Main region, each with their own exhibitions and programmes relating to this thematic complex, will participate at alternating times at both local and regional levels.

schließen