Tobias Zielony, The Fall, 2021, installation view at Museum Folkwang, photo: Jens Nober, courtesy the artist and KOW Berlin

Tobias Zielony - The Fall

Around forty photographs from recent years come together in two circulating sequences of images. Encounters, situations and places are related to each other.

In his work, Tobias Zielony repeatedly deals with the concept of youth culture in relation to origin, representation and fashion and the associated definition of identity in a changing media reality. The emergence of social networks and the permanent exchange of photographic images have fundamentally changed the idea of ​​the self and the forms of (self)representation. Zielony shows his protagonists as self-confident participants in this interplay, who, despite cultural and social differences, act in a global cosmos of social codes and self-images.

Tobias Zielony is known for his photographic depictions of young people living on the fringes of affluent societies and social acceptance. For the past 20 years, Zielony has focused on suburban milieus that, from Canada to England, Ukraine, Israel, and Japan, have in common that they have fallen out of the promises of modernity's progress and are establishing a temporary life in their own cultural niches.

What goes hand in hand with melancholy at the same time reveals a great human tenderness in the cohesion of precarious communities, which Zielony approaches and gives the space to stage themselves. In the process, Zielony's critical approach to documentary manifests itself in a specific aesthetic and relationship to fiction.