This year, Mercator brought you the topic of ‘Reflections’- physical, mental, emotional, abstract, realistic, surreal, conceptual and interactive - the participants took their choice! The submissions were indeed of a wide pool of styles and genres, exploring the theme of reflections on many levels, from the sense of thinking over something to the literal act of reflecting. The exhibition took place on Sunday the 11th of April in the Mercator Common Room and attracted a crowd keen to explore the reflections of their peers. With most of the submissions this year being photographs, the winner too was among the photography. The panel of judges included Prof. Brigitte Mersmann (Art History, Jacobs University Bremen), Dr. Larissa Kuehler, Mandy Boehnke, Peter Braun, Taylor Hartrick and Ognyan Seizov.

Paul Wenk won the first place with the photograph "Resignation", depicting a witty and multi-faceted view of our reflections on life, death and what may at times seem like a surreal reality. An image portraying the post-carnival fever tapering away, an angel stands in the underground station amidst the harsh realities of having to find the way from here on. Making a phone call, wings cast aside in the rubble, this captures the call to heaven or a call for us to question where we have come and how long may we afford to be saints in this world, which we are all faced with at one point or another? These are all questions reflected in this image. Latent with symbols and visual metaphors, the winner exhibits a clever twist on the extensive scope of the theme of reflections.

In second place were awarded Busra Todil and Brian Chan’s series of portrait photographs entitled ‘The Big Seven’. In the artists’ descriptions of the project, the work is said to reflect how we are programmed to recognize and respond to the 7 basic emotions as they are depicted in facial expressions as put forward in the psychology theories of Paul Ekman. Do we still recognize these in our inter-cultural environment, across men and women alike, do we still read them on the people we know as well as the ones we are not acquainted with; Busra and Brian have reflected upon this in their seven photographs which will have you gazing until you feel you have figured it all out!

The third prize was awarded the installation piece ‘Reflecting’, by Eva Bentcheva and Dejan Husman. This installation allows in only one viewer at a time to enter into a canvas cylinder where 24 charcoal nude drawings are displayed. The participants for this project were volunteers from the Jacobs community who were positioned and then drawn from mirrored perspectives. The project taps into the topic of perspective taking: through the images, we as viewers become exposed not only to two different physical perspectives of the same body but also experience the models through the eyes of two people who have different styles and different ways of perceiving. Inviting you to come inside and reflect on the pictures and enter into the artists head’s, the work is still hanging in the college office on exhibit.

(Text by Eva Bentcheva)

More pictures from the vernissage can be found here