Ricarda Roggan
Apokryphen
Ricarda Roggan/Wilhelm-Hack-Museum

Over the past two years Ricarda Roggan collected and loaned from various museums and institutions objects which originally belonged to a key figure in the German cultural canon. She photographed them like the ceramic fish once owned by Ricarda Huch or Martin Heidegger’s pocket watch. These objects remain as artefacts in collections and have no intrinsic value. They only take on historical significance when they are shown in public, suffused with an awareness of the identity of their former owners. But what will remain of an object once it has been taken down from its pedestal only to disappear again in the archives? The artist locates her photography in the gap that is created between the knowing viewer and the photographed object and asks the question: Can photography preserve and convey the original auras of these everyday objects? Apocrypha was shown in 2014 in the Echo exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover and at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen.