Inquiries Into Indexicality // Fabian Raphael Sokolowski

In the organizer's words:

Fabian Raphael Sokolowski (*1997 in Würzburg) lives and works in Düsseldorf. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2017 to 2024 in Peter Piller's class for fine art and painting as an extended field of action with Maximiliane Baumgartner. A stay abroad in 2022-2023 took him to the Painting Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen with Ferdinand Ahm Krag, before he completed his studies as a master student of Peter Piller.

In his exhibition Inquiries into Indexicality, Sokolowski questions the concept of the index - a concept that in semiotics refers to direct physical traces (such as a fingerprint or a photographic document) - and transfers it to the expanded space of painting. In doing so, he deconstructs the supposed objectivity of indexical signs, which often serve as the basis for scientific and social truth-finding. By collaging material traces, alienated reproductions and fragmented image quotations, he reveals the fragility of such "truths". His large-format canvases integrate, for example, screenshots from forums or referential brushstrokes that look like archival markings - a game with authenticity and manipulation.

A central motif of the exhibition is the examination of the politically charged imagery of the Internet. For example, Sokolowski reflects on the phenomenon of rolling coal - a practice in which truck drivers deliberately emit black diesel smoke, often as a provocation against environmental activism. The resulting clouds of smoke, both aesthetic and threatening, point to the paradoxical politicization of environmental protection as an identitary conflict. Sokolowski shows how indexical images in digital space become tools of interpretative power - and how their apparent evidential power is undermined by shifts in context.

The question posed by his works can be read in the sense of Georges Didi-Hubermann's study When Images Take Positions (2008). Didi-Huberman argues that images are not just passive testimonies, but actively intervene in political discourses. Following on from this, Sokolowski takes up the mechanisms with which images are ideologically charged and makes visible how they can be not only a documentation, but also a targeted staging of reality. His works demand a critical way of reading that is aware of the fragility and context dependency of pictorial truths.

Sokolowski, who also works as a curator and theorist, initiated the first major exchange between the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal Danish Academy. His research on responsibility in post-industrial late modernism and his co-founding of the journal Artis Observatio underline the interdisciplinary nature of his practice.

In Inquiries into Indexicality, he combines these approaches into a visual critique of the illusion of neutrality - be it in art, science or the images that shape our reality. The exhibition invites us to understand painting not as a passive representation, but as an activating medium that poses questions about power, representation and the construction of truth - always aware that the stroke of the brush can also be a political act.