betroffen brings together vintage prints from Renate Zeun’s eponymous photographic series, produced in the first half of the 1980s, in which the East German artist turns the camera on herself. Created within a visual culture that long resisted the circulation of aged, ill, or damaged bodies, the work insists on visibility at a moment when such images were only just becoming permissible in the GDR.
Zeun’s self-imaging resonates transnationally with artists such as Jo Spence and Robert Mapplethorpe, who similarly traced illness and corporeal change through their own bodies. Yet these photographs are neither confessional nor allegorical; instead, they sustain a cool, analytic intensity that collapses the distance between observer and observed.
On view at LOOCK Galerie from 6 March to 25 April 2026, betroffen frames the body as a political and affective site, where self-representation becomes an act of resistance against silence, erasure, and sanctioned regimes of visibility.
Renate Zeun (*1946 in Radebeul) lives in Berlin.
