Fotograf Magazine

Britta Thie is an artist from Berlin. She is also a model, an actress and a dancer, as we can see in the Alien Babies clip by Easter, the Berlin-based pop band – which also suggests she objectifies herself. Only in her last work, The SUPERHOST1 (2017), does Britta remain behind the camera, which is the space I will try to explore in this text.

Britta works with the picture of herself on different planes. In Hi HD (2012), she uses her personal video archives (that she started to create in her childhood) to sentimentally respond to the shift from analogue devices (cameras) to digital ones. A series of photographs of the artist in the role of a model, The Emotional Mobility Editorial (2013), is a critical campaign against the fashion industry, emphasizing human qualities as a commodity. The fashion photographs are accompanied with inscriptions such as “mild is the new jaded” or “the cooling of desire”. In her dual-channel video Shooting (2009), Thie also thematises modelling by presenting “more energy in your chin” or the expression of “arrogant suffering”. It is possible to think of her work as if it was not presenting the artist? Why is it important to look at Thie?