The international triennial RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain will present works by outstanding exponents of contemporary photography at more than ten venues in Frankfurt and the surrounding region. Under the heading “Extreme”, RAY 2018 will reflect on societal transformation, concepts of identity and aesthetic trends in the twenty-first century.

Given our exposure to an unfiltered deluge of digital images, what, if anything, still counts as extreme? And in the face of globalization and multiethnicity, how do things stand regarding acceptance of the supposedly exceptional?

Extreme. Bodies at the Museum Angewandte Kunst will turn the spotlight on representations of the body and of identity. The artists address the topics of gender, drug abuse, lives lived on the margins and poverty, as well as the overpowering presence or disappearance of one’s own body. Their works filter out the general visual background noise, leaving only the extreme: they show what is different, bizarre, excessive, what refuses to fit the norm, but also what is beautiful, fleeting, vulnerable, fragile – in a kind of photography that places the focus on the borderline case.

The concept underlying the 2018 triennial was developed jointly by curators from the participating institutions and photography collections: Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation), Peter Gorschlüter (MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main), Alexandra Lechner (Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie), Celina Lunsford (Fotografie Forum Frankfurt) and Matthias Wagner K (Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main).

Artists to be featured at the Museum Angewandte Kunst: Antoine d’Agata (b. 1961, FR), Jamie Brunskill (b. 1982, UK), Martin Liebscher (b. 1964, DE), Inez van Lamsweerde (b. 1963, NL), Vinoodh Matadin (b. 1963 NL), Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, UA), Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. 1945, FI) and Carolin Saage (b. 1988, DE).