Sophie Thun's work deals with the art historical tradition of (self-)representation and simultaneously reflects on the medium of photography in a multi-layered way. She uses her body as an instrument to show the production processes and the action spaces? of photography. With her pictures, she also questions social realities and gender ascriptions as well as the dependencies to which she is subject as an artist. The shutter release in her hand can be identified as a moment of artistic self-empowerment. Thun works with a combination of large-format photography on negative and photogram. She thus connects mimetic images with images through touch. In dialogue with self-portraits and self-stagings by Sophie Thun, the exhibition Trails and Tributes at Kunstverein Hildesheim shows photographic images from the archive of the artist Zenta Dzividzinska (ZDZ), who died in 2011. Thun artistically appropriated the works of the Latvian photographer during a research stay in Riga. It is an attempt to make visible the little-known and partly never exposed pictures of Zenta Dzividzinska, who was one of only two women in the Riga photo club during her lifetime and who has been denied wider public recognition until today.

Curated by Torsten Scheid and Christin Müller