(1997-1999). Similar to Tandberg, she makes herself the one and only protagonist, and, following Rimbaud’s dictum, repeatedly portrays ‹a different person›. Even though this always involves situations with several people, Hoffmann communicates only with herself in the end. In a manner nothing like Cottingham’s, she also takes advantage of electronic montaging and doubling possibilities, developing from photographicallygenerated start-material the images she later recombines on the computer. In the process, her staged everyday scenes concentrate on the moment preceding an actual story.

Like Bettina Hoffmann, who works with film and video among other media, Mitra Tabrizian uses a variety of media as well. In her works, Tabrizian combines a documentary-like visual language with advertising aesthetics in order to draw attention to the ideological undercurrents generated whenever any cultural identity is formed. The culture scientist Stuart Hall refers to Mitra Tabrizian’s works as «fictive visual spaces» which would evolve through the interplay of still photography and references to

cinematographic images. [11] At times the references to cinematographic scenes are recognizable, as for instance between Tabrizian’s «The Perfect Crime» and the aesthetics of Takeshi Kitano or Quentin Tarantino films. But the artist not only translates such quotes into her own photographic image-making practices; she also expands on contexts and heightens notions of gender and violence. With its bizarre story-line and excessively glaring colors, her «Beyond the Limits» project (2000) recalls comic books or caricatures. But regardless of how vivid the colors, or how dramatic the plot, the protagonists in Tabrizian’s images are characterized by an irritating lack of emotion: a woman lets her baby fall to the ground, a man shoots himself in the head. Everything is clearly recognizable, even the utter stiffness of those depicted – they seem less like human beings and more like artificial, emotionless Cyborgs or avatars.

Architecture and Landscape

Alongside confronting images of people, architectural and landscape photography, always among the central genres of pictorial history, are also essential to the contents of today’s artistic image-making