Lars Eidinger (Bilingual edition): Present Perfect

The title Present Perfect ambiguously relates to an ideal present on the one hand culminating in a perfect moment, and on the other hand to the English tense referring to a state or an action that began in the past and continues to the present. An allusion to the photography’s utopian attempt to enshrine the present moment, when it is only ever able to capture a moment in the past.

Echoing a plethora of attentive everyday observations, Eidinger’s photographs capture oftentimes paradoxical scenes of mundane life including people’s ambivalent behaviour. In a society of singularities, reality has become a colossal photomontage. Behind it lies an abysmal world entangled in contradictions. Eidinger depicts the lonely emptiness of modern life’s non-places, provisionalities, garishly out-of-place oddities. His confrontations with insufferable incongruities turn into symbolic images of an era of exhaustion. Present Perfect assembles new images captured with his mobile phone, as well as images taken with a reflex camera, tracing Eidinger’s photographic self-explorations over the past 20 years.