A dual exhibition by Kyra Tabea Balderer and Ellen Möckel

What happens when an image is translated? When perception is mediated by technical devices, a drawing is converted into digital data, or a gaze is shaped by cultural influences? The exhibition Ecstatic Echoes brings together the works of Kyra Tabea Balderer and Ellen Möckel and explores the traces, shifts, and resonances that arise in such processes.

Both artists work with methods of media translation. Technical apparatus and mechanical processes function not merely as tools, but as active agents within the production of images. Their works operate at the intersections of control and openness, intention and internal logic, human gesture and technical mediation. Differences arise in the moments of transmission—small deviations, blurriness, and transformations that give rise to new meanings.

Kyra Tabea Balderer uses large-format analog photography to explore the conditions of our perception. At the heart of her work lies the question of how historically and culturally developed notions shape our view of the world. Her photographs reveal that perception is never neutral, but is structured by social orders, concepts, and categories. In this context, the medium of photography becomes a tool for questioning the systems that determine how we perceive and organize the world.

In her printmaking works, Ellen Möckel explores the translation of analog content into digital processes. Using laser engraving, she transforms hand-drawn traces into mechanical imaging processes and explores the limits of this translation. In doing so, she focuses in particular on the fallibility of digital technologies: on disruptions, inaccuracies, and unexpected deviations that arise where precision is expected. Between the gesture of handwriting and mechanical inscription, images emerge that speak to the tensions between human expression and technical reproduction.

The title »Ecstatic Echoes« refers to an understanding of images as echoes. Not as mere repetitions, but as resonances as something that changes, shifts, and reforms in the process of transmission. The works by Balderer and Möckel make these movements visible. They present images as the results of complex mediations and open up a space in which perception, memory, material, and technology enter into multifaceted relationships with one another.