by Fionn Adamian, photos by Ryan Molnar // Aug. 30, 2024
Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld is not a photographer. The kaleidoscopic series of prints that comprise her project ‘Labor Lab,’ an upcoming solo exhibition at the Schering Stiftung’s project space, involve the camera only in a marginal sense. Presented as matte enlarged c-prints, the images are instead created through the application of solvents—hormones, breast milk, the morning after pill—to pre-exposed photo negatives. Schönfeld’s current project revolves around substances related to the female reproductive cycle, but in the past she’s also looked at recreational drugs like ketamine, LSD, and MDMA. Once an anonymous white powder, these faceless meddlers and tinkerers with our hormone levels take on a new and liquified personality through their effect on the negative. Schönfeld’s art is not photography, but it is interested in capturing an image of the hormonal unconscious: of her works from ‘Labor Lab,’ ‘Estrogen’ looks to me like a solar system, the ‘morning-after-pill’ looks like an amoeba under a microscope, the outline of ‘Mother’s Milk’ is surprisingly prickly and coarse.
Schönfeld’s studio is located in the Kunstquartier Bethanien, smack dab in the middle of Kreuzberg. We enter the shade of the high-ceilinged space from the summer afternoon, and Schönfeld is wearing the white coat of a lab technician—a fitting uniform for an artist that presents her results almost as an imitation of a petri dish, containing the crystalline structure of the substance. In Schönfeld’s telling, the inspiration for her project with party drugs, compiled under the title ‘All You Can Feel,’ came during her time as a bartender at Berghain. When her co-workers suggested putting together a group show of the employees that were involved in the arts, Schönfeld had already been experimenting with photo negatives and wanted to do something site-specific. In the context of the clubbing scene, drug consumption offered an experimentation field for trying on different personalities, albeit one marked by risk and precarity. The final aesthetics of Schönfeld’s project were a happy accident of trial and error. Schönfeld says that the strongest quality of the work might be its ability to act as a Rohrschach test, shifting according to the perspective of the viewer.
Taking a seat on a sofa in front of a coffee table scattered with titles by Esther Leslie and Silvia Federici, Schönfeld explains that the return to this method of producing images was accompanied by an investigation into the polysemous meanings of labor: labor as in uncompensated women’s work, labor as in childbirth, labor as in the German word for a scientific lab, or a developmental room for photography. Schönfeld says that her projects tend to evolve out of an attempt to make sense of what she was experiencing at the time. She had the idea for ‘Labor Lab’ while she was having a child, as a way of making the inner hormonal functioning of pregnancy visible. The historical discovery of hormones fascinates Schönfeld, particularly for the way that it created a modular understanding of the human organism, one in which a malfunctioning body chemistry could be optimized by adjusting the hormonal balance. Lethargic, fatigued, depressed? It might just be a matter of adding or subtracting the pharmaceutical dosage. In this respect, Schönfeld sees a similarity between these discourses and the capitalist understanding of labor as a system based on optimization and efficiency.
“I’m not so interested in photography in general,” Schönfeld said as she talked shop with our photographer about the differences between Kodak and Fuji film. “I’m only interested in the analog form.” In her own laboratory of the studio, Schönfeld not only brainstorms ideas, conducts research on the project’s theoretical foundations, and archives her materials, but she also does the delicate work of applying chemicals to the photo negative. The actual process of color development necessitates a trip outside the studio, since Bethanien only has a dark-room for black-and-white development in the basement. For this viewer, Schönfeld’s engagement with the processes of analog photography seems to track with the recent fad of analog in both the commercial world and contemporary art—a resurgent interest that is at least in part a reaction to the online blitz of post-truth imagery. On first glance, the analog form seems to carry itself with a firmer evidentiary authority than its digital counterpart. While the latter comes across as susceptible to an endless line of computerized modifications, the analog medium alludes to a time when a photograph signalled, as it did to Walter Benjamin, the spark of accident “burned through the person in the image with reality.”
Schönfeld’s chemical experiments, however, strike me as compelling for precisely the opposite reason: they make playful allusion to an alternate history of photography in which the truth of its representation has always been a contested state. In 1896, for example, the amateur photographer Louis Darget presented a set of chemically altered negatives, with an uncanny resemblance to Schönfeld’s work, before the French Academy of Sciences: he wanted to pass them off as evidence of our invisible “vital fluids.” Schönfeld’s work does not make the pseudo-scientific claims of Darget’s, but it does use the idiosyncrasies of the analog form to give a visual characterization to the hormonal aspect of the self that is always present, if not visible. And, in the case of Schönfeld’s work as well as Darget’s, we aren’t immediately sure what we’re looking at, even though the presentation of the images seem to suggest their pleasure in riding the fine boundary between art object and scientific finding, between an aesthetic mode and a utilitarian one.
At the end of the studio visit, Schönfeld turned to a discussion of the dark side of the contraception drugs that take center stage in several of her artworks. “If you think about the pill in terms of flattening out the cyclical nature of women’s bodies, I find this problematic in terms of making distance between the human and the body.” The subject of alarm and regulation, hormones speak to the feeling of entrapment in one’s body. They seem like a part of us, and something inflicted on us, too. Schönfeld’s art plays with this dissociation by turning one’s body chemistry into an encounter. What if the stranger you meet face to face is yourself?
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
Schering Stiftung
Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld: ‘Labor Lab’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 11; 6–10pm
Exhibition: Sept. 12–Dec. 1, 2024
scheringstiftung.de
Unter den Linden 32–34, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
