Silja Yvette – VISUALIZED VOLTAGE

As the subtitle A Dialogue of Dichotomous Hybrids indicates in her book Collective Creatures (ed. Hatje Cantz) Silja Yvette’s photographic work is nourished by a process of transformations of matter, mass and energy and juxtapositions of ecological, philosophical, and artistic concepts.

In this continuum of images where ontological boundaries fall to give way to hermeneutic intertextualities and associative details, photography reveals the strange beauty of a visible on the margins.

Rather than highlighting the mnemonic qualities of the photographed objects, she plays on the thematic and artistic strategies of tensions that emanate from the hybrid fragments of the image, as highlighted by the revealing titles of her approach: Separationsgedanke (thought of separation), Widerwille (reticence), Ordnungswidrigkeit (dissipated conduct).

Between symmetry and decomposition, between harmony and disorder, between movement and stillness, the elements that make up Yvette’s photography present themselves as a work open to our interpretation. For the pleasure of contemplation, in front of each photograph there is the same initial questioning about the nature of things.   

Paul di Felice

BIO

Silja Yvette was born in 1986 in Erlangen in Germany. She lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main (Germany). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 2011 and added studies in architecture until 2010 and philosophy until 2018. She has been exhibiting works in Germany since 2006, since 2011 in other European countries and in 2016 in Beijing. Her artistic work deals with a tradition of dialectic of enlightenment focusing in a today’s context on ecological aspects and on the relationship between human beings and the world of natural and artificial things. Her work frequently approaches the absurdity of a well restricted and administrated nature with a captivated eye pointing on the influence and the social interactiveness of things. 2017 her first monograph Season of Admin was published at Kerber Verlag and was selected for „Longlist of Most Beautiful German Books 2018“ of Stiftung Buchkunst (Frankfurt/ Leipzig). With Collective Creatures her second monograph followed and was published 2019 by Hatje Cantz Verlag which recently won silver at the renowned Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 19/20 (German Photobook Award).