ARTIST’S APPROACH
As a documentary photographer, Reiner Riedler concentrates particularly on human beings and their environment. The main focus of his documentary work is to question our value systems. As a traveller, he visits the periphery of our habitats, always searching for the fragile beauty of human existence with its desires and abysses.
The favourite theme of the artist remains human existence and its ephemeral nature, including all its most beautiful and most terrible aspects, and making the whole explicit through the photographic image. His recent conceptual works question the nature of photography and the way we look at the world that surrounds us.
THE ARTWORK
Photography, 2004-2008
Fake Holidays gives viewers a playful and destabilizing look at how people these days are preoccupied with the notion of travelling around the world to exotic locations, whether they really do it or not. The artist is determined to show in this case how society chooses to recreate the expected sensation of evasion even when staying at home is the only option to experience the journey of travels.
“When wishes are out of reach, simulation takes over our leisure time and our holidays. Imaginary worlds are created, often with massive technological effort, in order to offer us experience as reproducible merchandise. Although the quality of these adventures on demand sometimes proves to be rather dubious, the boom does shed light on one thing: the yearnings and dreams underlying people’s daily lives.” – Reiner Riedler
Fake Holidays features colour photographs by the documentary photographer Reiner Riedler, taken between 2004 and 2009, that later became a book by the same name. The photos depict replicated tourist destinations and simulated experiences in eight different countries. Need a vacation? How about a fake holiday?
Curator : Maude Arsenault
