Rebekka Deubner (DE/FR, b. 1989) is a German-born artist, currently based in Paris. Her images often explore the filiation and interdependence of mutant plant, animal and mineral bodies, which she combines with sound, video, text and objects to create engaging presentations. Her works often come together in book form, whether self-published or produced with publishers – including September Books, Art Paper Editions and Sasori Books. Since studying art history and photography, her work has been exhibited by the likes of LE BAL, Villa Noailles and Paris Photo, and in 2022, she received support from the Centre national des arts plastiques for a project on male contraception. In the same year, her post 3.11 project on Japan’s Fukushima prefecture was shortlisted for the BALxADAGP awards. In 2023, Deubner began teaching photography at ENSBA Lyon. She is represented by Espace Jörg Brockmann in Switzerland.
Tributes are processes that amplify existence. The dead gain in reality. He can thus prolong the effects he had as a living being in the lives of those who will now inherit him, and make him live differently: a multiple being with multiple effects, and therefore more present in his new mode of existence.
– Vinciane Desprets, Au bonheur des morts, La découverte, 2015.
“After her death, my mother’s clothes became relics of her hollowed-out body. She left traces of wear – odours, stains, darning, holes – across the textiles, marking them with vivid shapes. The strip series revolves around the body, its filial memory and its metamorphoses. I see photography as a restorative act, and approach the materiality of an image as a possible form in the face of absence. Playing with my mother’s wardrobe, using both video and photograms, I slip into her skin in every possible way as a means to inhabit her presence.”
“Reduced to its essence of light and photosensitive surfaces, the photographic process becomes further embodied in the absence of a camera – which can act as a ‘bridge’ or a ‘barrier’ to reality when shooting. In this way, I seek to highlight a form of transposition through an economy of technologies: to make an imprint without a body, and to create a space-time for and through a recording device, which is animated by the deceased.”
