The exhibition Future’s past by Sven Marquardt will open at FLORA / THE LIGHTHOUSE in Timisoara, Romania, during the light-art festival “Lights on Romania”. A variety of visuals, designed by Jonas Meyer, focus on Marquardt’s EASTSIDE photographs from 1984-89 as well as on his later works from 2004-19, which are curated by protagonists of the night.
Born in East Berlin in 1962, Sven Marquardt was a formative part of the emerging Punk, New Wave and artists’ scenes of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg from the mid 1980s. When the Berlin Wall came down, he took an out-time from photography and immersed himself in Berlin’s newly developing club scene. Since the late 1990s, with his job as a doorman for the club Ostgut, he has been fascinated with the theme of ‘night.’
After working as a doorman at the legendary Ostgut club, Sven went on to become the nightlife icon when Berghain opened in 2004. Inspired by the cultural atmosphere of Berlin, Sven returned to photography in the late 1990s with his exhibitions traveling the world.
The people portrayed by Sven Marquardt are carefully selected from the artist’s circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances. From his very beginning as a photographer, Marquardt had always been interested in the individualists, the not-streamlined, whether in East Berlin of the 1980s, where he started his career, or in the reunified Berlin since 2000. Even at first view it is clear that these are people full of self-confidence, heroes of their own life, capable of creating breathing space for freedom even in adverse conditions.
FLORA / THE LIGHTHOUSE — a cultural significant space in Timisoara — underlines with its ruin-like and abandoned character the meaning of Future’s past. During the light-art festival Sven Marquardt’s protagonists of the night come into light connecting the moment of present and past. The figures in the black-and-white photographs of Marquardt’s series EASTSIDE seem to emerge from unknown fields of deep black. In the context of the exhibition, this photo series will be shown for the first time digitally visualized by Jonas Meyer. The photographs, which are dated later, bring the subcultural Berlin nightlife from different decades to life again. The pronounced light-dark effects are a very conscious and skillful stylistic choice of the artist Sven Marquardt. With the clear outlines and hard shadows bodies, postures and faces exhibit true individuality. Thus, his photographs capture the singular essence of these individuals.
Since 2015 Sven Marquardt showed his photographic work in various exhibitions, including Berlin, Belgrade, Sydney and New York City, followed numerous invitations by the German Goethe Institut, lives in residences and works for magazines like Interview, Sang Bleu, and L’Uomo Vogue, as well as for fashion labels such as Hugo BOSS, Levi’s, ITEM m6, Baldessarini, Liebeskind and lately G-Star. Starting in 2015 he has been teaching as a lecturer at the OSTKREUZ School of Photography and in 2019 as guest lecturer at the Polimoda, International Institute for Fashion Design and Marketing, Florence.