The exhibition Joan Fontcuberta: What Darwin Missed presents a new series of 40 works specially conceived for the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung by internationally recognized Catalan photographer, curator, essayist, and lecturer Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955). The artist is renowned for his playful way of engaging audiences but also addressing the boundaries between reality and fiction. His works reflect on the role of photography in representing reality and frequently deal critically—but always humorously and provocatively—with the image in scientific disciplines such as botany or zoology.

For the current exhibition, Fontcuberta engaged intensively with the foundation’s archive and resumed a research project Alfred Ehrhardt had started in 1938 for the Natural History Museum in Hamburg but was unable to complete due to historical circumstances. Fontcuberta’s research quest in the footsteps of Charles Darwin for a special species of coral called Cryptocnidaria serves as a narrative starting point out of which the exhibition develops, one based entirely on the relationship between fact and speculation, science and art—not everything the eye sees should be accepted uncritically as truth, and not everything that claims to be scientific is necessarily correct.

In conversation with Christiane Stahl, Fontcuberta will carry out how his new work aims to encourage us not to succumb to the persuasive illusion of images. In addition to explaining the project, the talk will include the subject of iconophagy. Screen images have no physical substance, they are proliferating, dematerializing and entering the category of “non-things” (Byung-Chul Han). But even in the non-material dimension of the image, that of pure information, it can be said that images have always eaten each other, a hypothesis that according to the Catalan artist “fully addresses the legacy of Aby Warburg”.

Admission free. Please register in advance at: info@aestiftung.de