Spending time at Delmes & Zander, James Richards* has convened an intimate path through thirty years of the gallery’s program. Choosing works from the gallery’s archives by Aurel Iselstöger, Miroslav Tichý, Sava Sekulic and Karl Hans Janke, to mention a few, the selection is intuitive and associative. There is a focus on drawing and works on paper as a form of direct communication. Artist Tolia Astali (born 1974 in Tifis, Georgia) provides the architectural framework for the exhibition. Her work acts as both display structure and atmospheric holding environment, becoming an organic tissue against which the works from the gallery storage spaces are installed. This playful mixing of background texture and foreground display opens up new in- terpretative possibilities as well as blurring the boundaries between the curatorial logic and artwork, while conveying a personal navigation of Delmes & Zander's history.

Albrecht Becker (1906 – 2002), best known as a successful set designer and flm architect (Haupt- mann von Köpenick, Das Glas Wasser) and for his controversial biography – he was imprisoned by the Nazis under paragraph 175 – has also created an extensive artistic body of work.

The exhibition Albrecht Becker – Libidinal Motion, curated by Lucas Foletto Celinski*, will focus on the photomontage self-portraits Becker made in later years. His experimental photo- graphic images, constructed through a range of diverse techniques, such as multiple-exposure, mirror refection and collage, combine the depiction of motion with body-related self-explorations. Capturing separate instants of action in one static image, his photomontages render the impression of movement, bringing to mind Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of motion.

The exhibition provides insight into Becker's body explorations and a queer take on body and movement. A pioneer of body modifcation, Becker's photomontages situate his body as a site for mutable and constant transformation. Becker's staged “body-play” transcends the boundaries of still and motion, natural and artifcial, private and public. They render testimony to an auto-erotic obsession.

As part of a research project at the Schwules Museum Berlin, James Richards has previously worked with Becker's photomontages in his collaborative flm with Steve Reinke: What Weakens The Flesh is The Flesh Itself ( 2017).

The exhibition takes place with the friendly support of Collection Hervé Joseph Lebrun.