Bouquet (Birthday)

Our perception of reality is saturated with images, and the images we know determine those we make. Even the seemingly radical break from the convention only confirms this. The real outbreak is through the pictures. With her conceptual photographs, Annette Kelm undermines the conventions of commercial photography by overpowering them: the bright colors, the hallucinatory sharpness, the solemn arrangements. Only things don't do as they should. They don't belong to each other, but they do so. While the advertising is designed to seduce people and make things larger than life, things in Annette Kelm's pictures free themselves from the frame and become autonomous: for example, the three colored roses, which do not know where to go with the eccentric results of their beauty treatment, or the willow branch that protrudes above the top of the picture. The background used in photo studios, called the groove, is also revealed at the bottom of the picture, where it rolls up and shows the back as what it is: paper. BOUQUET (BIRTHDAY) is a puzzle in which everything is open.