CATALOGUE TEXT| The Shared Now
What defines our present? Global challenges – from climate change to war – shape our everyday lives. Or do they?
In his ongoing project, which began in 2024, photographer Göran Gnaudschun explores all those situations that truly make up our everyday lives. Beyond the major political issues of the day, his photographs reflect on what preoccupies us day in, day out: what makes us sad, what makes us happy, what makes us ponder or cheer.
We see the colour imprint of a child’s hand on paper, pinned to a tree. It is located in the Bundeswehr’s Forest of Remembrance in Geltow and serves as a memorial to the fallen Bundeswehr soldier, who was also a father. We see an Israeli dog tag bearing the date 7 October 2023 around the neck of an unknown person, commemorating the brutal attack by Hamas on that day.
But alongside them are dancing white butterflies forming a pattern on the brown clay soil, or a soft feather in a child’s hand. If we look very closely, we realise not only that the large electricity pylons no longer carry electricity, but also the unknown compassion suggested by the sweets on a homeless person’s pillow, or the toy elephant that is far too small next to the actually enormous Eurofighter, which seems to be sailing peacefully through the clouds like a bird. Sceptical, open or curious – in any case very different – people of various generations look back at us in this series, as if to agree: in the blink of an eye, the present becomes the past. The simultaneity of events exists only in our imagination, and the subsequent interpretation of what has happened shapes history.
The fragile state of the ‘now’ is shaped by countless voices and individuals and their differing perceptions. The present is polyphonic, and we must find our own place within it.
Annegret Laabs, 2026