Malte Sänger Biography

Malte Sänger is interested in the traces people leave behind in their lives. In his work Partition, for which he was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the HfG Photo Award in 2015, he shows photographs of 19 hard disks that he had bought at commodity prices. After being restored, the hard disks turned into an archaeological site for the private, for worries, hardships, e-mails, sexual fantasies, medical findings—information of an immense quality that fundamentally opposes the materiality of the data carrier that had become trivial.

In Abdrücke, Malte Sänger reconstructs digital traces that people have left behind while fleeing and makes them visible in satellite photos, texts and personal pictures before these fade away again in the course of a day on light-sensitive paper. His book project Shifting Baselines, for which he was awarded the German Photo Book Prize 2018/2019 in silver, brings together 71 of his analogue Hasselblad photographs from all over the world, whose locations are often thousands of kilometres apart and which are juxtaposed without comment. Freed from context, the loosely bound overall structure of these photographs in this publication allows space and time to merge.

Malte Sänger's works can already be found in important collections such as the art collection of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Klingspor Museum Offenbach. In addition to the prizes mentioned above, he has been awarded various scholarships and residencies, such as the Johannes Mosbach Foundation and the Frankfurter Künstlerhilfe, a catalogue grant from the Dr. Marschner Foundation, the second prize of the Marianne Brandt Competition, and the Casa Piccola artist residency in Colloro, Italy, 2018.

Text courtesy Galerie—Peter—Sillem.