Markus Krottendorfer - Book Presentation & Talk

book presentation

Markus Krottendorfer will discuss his publications with Christian Egger and Heike Maier-Rieper (in German), followed by Scott Clifford Evans reading an excerpt of his text from Eyes of the Night (in English)

The books will be available for sale at the gallery.

Terminal
Markus Krottendorfer
Text: Christian Egger
Graphic Design: Christian Bretter
Softcover, 128 pages, German
FOTOHOF, 2024
ISBN 978-3-903334-52-6

“In many of his projects, Markus Krottendorfer is interested in the foundations of our modernity and present, in the traces of fictions and mythologies and the conflicts between rationality and irrational desire, which could still be virulent at the core of our societies. He always finds special places where traces of strange and contradictory (historical) world designs can be found or places where questions about the effectiveness or their (former) utopian potentials can be asked. In this book, the closed Athens Ellinikon Airport becomes the setting for his photographic and performative examination of the (architectural) remnants of ideologies that were formative until the 1960s: technical development, progress, growing prosperity, which also found its expression on the increasing conquest of the world through travel. Airports became the embodiment of this “progress”, at the same time spaces of new social formations, and finally “non-places”, as Marc Augé called it. Through complex lighting, filters and with the partial use of smoke, Krottendorfer transforms the rooms of the airport into an “illusionistic, theatrical psychedelic”, as Christian Egger writes in his text contribution. Architectural orders and spatial conditions are rewritten and rewritten by these precise photographic stagings into equally precisely composed photographs. Krottendorfer relies exclusively on analog photo material. It seems as if a disappeared world is brought to life in order to temporarily reconver these spaces as colorful, but at the same time also melancholic, eerie. Terminal documents Krottendorfer’s uncompromising way of “thinking photography” (Christian Egger), which “compared to the infinitely possible, artificially intelligent other images” (Christian Egger) seems lively, promising and subtle.”

• Text by Reinhard Braun, translated into English

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Eyes of the Night
Scott Clifford Evans - Markus Krottendorfer
Text: Scott Clifford Evans
Foreword: Brigitte Huck
Editor-in-Chief: Heike Maier-Rieper
Graphic Design: Christian Bretter
Hardcover, 176 pages, English & German
Verlag für moderne Kunst (vfmK), 2025
ISBN 978-3-99153-108-1

A book like a high-wire act – balancing between truth and deception, documentation and fiction, trash and the grotesque. In their joint publication, American filmmaker Scott Clifford Evans and Austrian photographer Markus Krottendorfer intertwine their artistic approaches to create a multifaceted narrative world that merges cinema, photography, and literature. The starting point is Krottendorfer’s fascinating photo series on the EVN power plants – industrial giants that, in his analog photographs, transform into dystopian landscapes. These unsettling images inspired Evans to develop his horror film concept The Eyes of Ra, an eerie tale about a dying small town where an old power plant comes to life and harbors terrifying secrets. Tentacled creatures, ghostly machines, and portals to other dimensions – in Evans’ laconic storytelling style, classic horror motifs merge with social critique and teenage coming-of-age.