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Künstliche Welten – work by the Hamburg artist Tim Kubach


In his most recent series of photographs, entitled Künstliche Welten (Artificial Worlds) Tim Kubach explores the artificial element in spaces devoted to leisure. This series, encompassing approximately 20 large-format colour photographs, focuses on a representation of the interplay between artificial, simulated environments and reality.

Tim Kubach photographed his Künstliche Welten series in a documentary style using a large-format camera. He shows deserted swimming pool complexes, underground crazy-golf courses and indoor playgrounds. With their painted palm trees, plastic plants, brightly-coloured plastic figures and contrived scenes these places are supposed to provide recreation and entertainment. Partly lit by natural light, partly by artificial light, these spaces, being enclosed and deserted of people, appear desolate and frozen. At the same time, these photographs, whose composition is influenced by painting, stand out for their bizarre beauty.

They reveal in minute detail the everyday conditions and features of spaces within our pleasure- and thrill-seeking society. The spaces, however, by their grotesque nature, thwart the pretence of normality. These are heterotopias in the foucauldian sense. According to Foucault these spaces represent, on the one hand, reality; on the other, however, they are ‘juxtapositions’, insofar as they challenge the everyday and familiar, and transform these into images that are influenced by fantasy and utopian ideas (Foucault: Of Other Spaces).
Images of palm trees, the sun, the beach and sea are usually associated in the viewer’s mind with ideas of leisure, play and pleasure. By being transferred to artificial spaces these motifs lose much of their authenticity and become a surrogate, a clichéd ersatz of the genuine experience. Tim Kubach’s work deals with this phenomenon of the artificial and contrived, thereby helping the viewer break free of accustomed viewing habits and recognise the artificial character of these spaces.

weissenhaeuser strand 02

2006

tropical islands 02

2006

indoo 01

2006

holsten therme 06

2006

gilde bowling 05

2006