Photo studio shop windows often reveal the normative framework of our society. The installation Das Fotostudio (The Photo Studio) takes advantage of this stage to display and cross current gender and family clichés by temporarily transforming shop windows of vacant business premises into supposed photo studios. Their design is reminiscent of conventional photo studios – but they show counter-hegemonic, queer imagery.
The photo studio critically questions constructions of reality in our present. Everyday realities that are taken for granted, such as heteronormativity, bisexuality or beauty norms, which insidiously manifest themselves as lived realities, are deconstructed in an imaginary (thinking) space. By transforming this imaginary place into a real public space in the form of a shop window, multiple pluralities of meaning become visible in this way. This critical questioning happens simultaneously on several levels and is led ad absurdum by the oscillation between illusion and reality. It is precisely through the medium of photography, to which the claim of a true-to-life depiction of reality has always been attributed and which in this century shapes our perception on a daily basis, that the staging of the show in the photo studio as a means of critical deconstruction of reality becomes additionally ambivalent.

Lisa Großkopf (*1989, Vienna) studied at the Linz University of Art, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been shown at the Organhaus (Chongqing, CN), the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv, IL), Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna, AT) and the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt/Main, DE), among others. She was awarded the Startstipendium für Fotografie (2017) and the Gabriele Heidecker Prize, (2017) for her work.
In her conceptual artistic practice, Lisa Großkopf deals in an experimental and humorous way with the interplay of aesthetics and the mediation of reality. Her sometimes site-specific installations and works encompass diverse forms of expression, including performative interventions in public space, photographs, videos and printed matter such as posters and artists’ books.