SO WHAT!

The exhibition "SO WHAT!" presents a comprehensive body of work of artist and photographer Susanne Junker. With over 200 photographs, installations and videos, it sheds light on 30 years of creation by this extraordinary artist: from the early self-portraits of the 1990s to her most recent works.

Using her camera as a tool, Susanne Junker, born in 1973, has developed her very own, visually powerful language dedicated to the representation of female identity and the mechanisms of its staging in the media. Her work is characterized by reflections on beauty, gender roles and social power relations - themes that are more topical than ever in an era of digital self-presentation.

Susanne Junker: “I worked as a model in the early 1990s. It was the glamorous era of supermodels, whose perfect physical appearances embodied a beauty standard dominated by the male gaze. These rigid norms were unbearable for me and led me to transform myself from object to author by becoming an artist.”

Junker therefore began to put herself in the picture and used the self-portrait as a means of rebellion. With her photographs, she reclaimed her identity and at the same time questioned the world of the media, which she experienced as a model. To this day, Junker's artistic activities revolve around some fundamental questions: Who are we? What is beauty? What is perfection? In doing so, she exposes stereotypes, breaks taboos and dismantles the normative ideas of femininity that are shaped by advertising, film and pop culture.

Since the 1960s, new art forms such as performance and body art have expanded the traditional concept of the work, dissolving the boundaries between art and everyday life and thematizing the relationship between artist and life. Artists such as Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Ulrike Rosenbach, Marina Abramović and Niki de Saint Phalle shaped this development by placing the female body, personal experiences and social norms at the center of their work.

Susanne Junker joins this tradition: Like the installation artist Jenny Holzer, who used the visual language of advertising to spread quickly understandable messages, Junker also uses her art as a political tool. Her works are thus also in dialog with pioneers such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Valie Export. While Sherman exposes the manipulation of women's images in film in her staged self-portraits and Kruger addresses social power relations with statements such as "Your body is a battleground", Junker uses the female body as a medium for personal and political messages.

In addition, her photographs, installations and actions take up the dynamics of social media, in which self-presentation is often exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness. This interplay between voyeurism, self- determination and media staging becomes visible in Junker's works through alienated body images, humorous exaggerations and subversive text elements that reveal and critically question the absurdity of idealized beauty standards.

Jan T. Wilms, Director, Center for Contemporary Art in the Glaspalast Augsburg

The exhibition "SO WHAT!" is presented by the artists' association "Die Ecke" e.V. in cooperation with the art collections and museums of the city of Augsburg and was curated by Chiara Padovan.

© SusanneJunker 2026