Alexa von Arnim : Souvenir

Bringing together a mix of still lives that appreciate the weird details, fashion-inspired joie de vivre and spontaneous snapshots, Alexa wants us to stop and smell the flower that is the moment. As a counterbalance to our fast-paced social media driven life, she chooses the medium of analogue photography to celebrate details you usually might forget when you’re only passing by. Worshiping the beauty that is the mundane, her style and subjects leave behind an ambiguity of where and when the pictures were taken. While at first glance it may seem as though you only see a fragment, taken as a whole the exhibition becomes a full rounded experience, from the food you can almost taste, to the friends you feel you know and the places you feel like you’ve visited. By showing herself as an intimate and living part of her work, she opens the window for you to be more than an observer. She invites the spectator to become a fellow traveler and awakens our wanderlust – a lust for life that is a vacation.

What is a souvenir? A memory of a time and place? A kitschy fridge magnet? A postcard sent to your loved ones? A photo you took to prove you were there?

For Alexa von Arnim, it’s a combination of all of these things. Sharing with us her photographic travel journey, she takes us on a trip from the vibrant beaches of Mexico, to the snowy mountains of Austria to the moody roughness of Bretagne. While the locations change, the kitsch and beauty stay the same, interlinking places emotionally and visually that are miles apart.