Maya Sehmer: I just wanna make you sweat

In the organizer's words:

Drenched in sweat, breathless, high pulse: exhausted, the protagonists in Maya Sehmer's portraits look at us. The pictures are a search for a moment in which something from the inside comes to the surface.

For the pictures, she asked people from her environment to do sport for her and photographed them immediately afterwards. Sometimes she had to ask her models to do even more sport and push themselves further to their limits.

Exhaustion becomes a moment of loss of control, in which something comes to light that is otherwise invisible. In addition to the physical aspects, the dynamic between model and photographer is also explored: Is a power imbalance created between the actors?
How much can we demand of each other?

Maya Sehmer is a Berlin-based photographer and student at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. Her artistic interest lies in documentary photography, broadly defined and open to the border areas between observation and staging.

Opening: 10.05.25 // 7 pm

Link: https://www.instagram.com/maya.uma.sehmer/