Sora Park – With me, with you. Portraits and Still lifes

Born in 1991 in Gimpo, South Korea, artist Sora Park was awarded the August Sander Prize in 2022 for her series "Bei mir, bei Dir" (With me, with you). Portraits from the series are presented in this exhibition, accompanied by selected still life compositions, another area of Sora Park's work.

As early as 2015, when she left her homeland for Germany, she used photography to familiarize herself with her new living environment and also the people. First, she explored her rooms in Essen and Berlin via camera - she also included the one in South Korea - looking at and arranging objects located there in idiosyncratic still life compositions. The resulting photographs deal with levels of meaning in comparison with one's own perception and are also a search for personal localization, in which the question of what feeling at home or feeling alien can mean is echoed.
This moment is also effective in the award-winning series "Bei mir, bei Dir" (With me, with you). The works are predominantly individual portraits taken in Sora Park's own apartment or in that of the sitter. "I want to compare and contrast how people react and behave at home or in a new place," says the photographer, who is studying at the Folkwang University in Essen, "but i'm also interested in capturing a person's state of mind and finding out what their facial expressions, gestures and body language reveal about them in relation to their surroundings." The young men and women featured in the photographs are fellow students, friends and family members, but also initially strangers. Beyond their surroundings, Sora Park presents a young generation of the artistic-creative milieu and a phase of life in which the paths to the future appear open, in which people try out, search and find. 

Sora Park realizes her photographs with an analog large-format camera and the negative format 4 x 5 inches, a tripod is also used. It is remarkable that Sora Park always takes only one exposure per motif, which further intensifies the intensity of her work.