unusual experiences: Solo Exhibition by Florian Hetz
Florian Hetz (b. 1980, Germany) uses photography in a process of mapping, navigating his life and his milieu through visual artifacts. Having suffered encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, Hetz’s memory was significantly affected and he was left with extensive memory loss. Photography served as a tool to mitigate this and ultimately provided a point of departure for his practice. This accounts for the fragmented nature of Hetz’s work, which is suggestive of its link to memory.
Susan Sontag aptly stated that ‘photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal’, Hetz’s awareness of this is strikingly visible in his work. He doesn’t attempt to disguise the photographs as depictions of reality or truth. Rather, he constructs almost painterly images through his use of composition, lighting, and color schemes. Hetz conflates memory and desire, seeking to uproot and visualize hidden desires that are commonly experienced by people with nonconforming sexual or gender identities, thereby also contributing to the canon of queer cultural memory. He aims to take up space and underscore these desires, presenting them in a tender and sensual way, whilst nonetheless remaining confrontational. The viewer is supposed to stare, not look away.
Hetz's practice emphasizes sensuality and tactility; in unusual experiences, he seeks to further explore these themes. This appeal to the senses is thematically recurring in Hetz's body of work, stating that viewers should be able to feel as though they could almost touch and smell the subjects of his photographs. The intimate manner in which subjects are depicted extends beyond the photographs of bodies, Hetz draws similarities between his human and non-human subjects through compositional and stylistic consistency, allowing these non-human subjects the same tenderness and tactility as their counterparts. In doing so, he establishes a link between these seemingly unrelated subjects. Through his subjects and their framing, Hetz counters socio-cultural conventions of portraiture as well as challenging and playing with the idea of masculinity as derived from a heteronormative framework. Consequently, he facilitates a space wherein the viewer can navigate these themes in a meaningful way.
In unusual experiences, Hetz will present viewers with familiar and unfamiliar fragments. The individual photographs form a coherent whole when presented alongside each other and they start to seem suggestive of a narrative.
With three major book publications, The Matter of Absence, Zwei, and Aiko, Hetz has previously had the opportunity to formally organize his body of work in a coherent physical format. Alongside these publications, Hetz has had several solo and group shows. Furthermore, he was an artist in residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation from 2018 to 2019. In 2023 he was in residency at the foundation once more, testifying to the cultural significance of his practice.
Text by Ruben Stoffelen
