Sirius
2023
This is the story of a young man and a young woman. He invents fantasy stories and claims he comes from the star Sirius. She could go there too, if only she could leave her human body behind and the safety of her life on Earth.
He manipulates her and, night after night, makes up lies to take her life. For very prosaic reasons, she fails her suicide attempt (a remotely controlled murder) to reach Sirius. In the 1980s, the “Sirius case” became a famous case study in German criminal law.
Photography is a reliable means of evidence to establish criminal facts. But here, the boundaries between story and crime cannot be established. Anna Szkoda’s work rejects the documentary approach: in a world of manipulation, could the camera be more than an accomplice capturing illusions ?
—
With the support of the Gœthe-Institut
Portfolio
About the artist
Born in 1982 in Tychy (Poland), Anna Szkoda is a photographer and sociologist based in Berlin. Following a sensitive approach to artistic storytelling with a focus on societal topics, her work relies on serial conceptual portraits. Anna Szkoda’s photographs have been exhibited and published internationally.