Room Portraits / Menno Aden

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Room Portraits

German photographer Menno Aden makes us see the world from above with its latest series of photographs entitled Portraits Room. It is indeed improbable angles that Menno captures interiors from floor to ceiling what a feeling strange and unusual. The artist plays obviously on the side “monitoring” and voyeurism to attract you, the audience deep into his shots.

The rooms, all in Berlin, range from apartments, to shops, to a school. The photos are meant to feel voyeuristic in order to draw parallels to our culture. By placing his camera on the ceiling, Aden shoots the familiar rooms in an abstract way, reexamining their structure by showing them two-dimensionally.

It is a journey from outer space into private space. At the end of the journey we see into a private bedroom from above like through a surveillance camera of an invisible spaceship that seems to be captured in the room. – see the video

Menno Aden

Through challenging camera angles Menno Aden abstracts most familiar actual living environments and public interiors into flattened two-dimensional scale models. A camera that the artist installed on the ceiling of various rooms takes pictures downwards of the interiors. The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream.-Miriam Nöske