March 14 – 18, 2018
Flexspace B, CICA Museum
Statement
young men and slaughtered animals
The photographic series arranges the bodies of young men with those of dead animals ; between irritating disgust and aesthetic fascination. Both the men and the animals alike have been butchered, skinned, and plugged to become supermarket products in a digital iconoclasm. Seemlingly in the distance are the naked and hairless bodies of the adolescent males that present the lifeless creatures into the camera; holding the creatures in their hand or wearing them on their shoulders. The recordings cite motifs from the renaissance period, while breaking with the contemporary taboo of death’s visibility. The bloody head of rabbit or the cut throat of a suckling pig receive a new aesthetic quality through the gripping power of its wearer. The animals are not just prey, they are rather a disturbing reminder of the youthful hunter’s own mortality, in times of ever shorter and more efficient breeding cycles regarding their industrial production.
Danny Frede
Danny Frede was born in 1982 in Sondersausen (Thuringia/ Germany) and is an autodidactic photographer and artist. Danny considers his gap year in Cologne as a community servant in 2000 a success in spite of having forgotten to go to college afterwards. Danny works as a freelancer in the areas of photography and Graphics. His art work inside the urban periphery deals with the translation of traditional concepts of painting into the views of everyday life that have been increasingly influenced by digital processes.
