Jonas Höschl

"Through which framing do we perceive images? How comprehensively is our perception of global events influenced by their media processing? Which contextualization comes closest to the actual events? Can there be reporting that objectively reflects this?"

Raising questions like these - posed by art historian and photography theorist Mira Anneli Naß - rather than presenting answers, is at the core of Jonas Höschl's artistic practice. Based on his media-reflexive work, the artist gathers in Politics of Media Images numerous theorists, artists and authors who deal with media-theoretical questions in our increasingly fragile present time. The contributions make our social inflammations and injuries painfully tangible under a burning glass.

"This criticism of journalistic reporting is repeated in his most recent work, And let my cry (2022): it is the transcript of an (internal) recording the Bavarian Broadcasting Company made during the setup and rehearsal for the memorial service for the victims of the racist attack in Munich’s Olympia shopping center in 2016. (...) False reports led to panic in the city, and despite the perpetrator’s unambiguous statements in chat forums, authorities long pointed to his psychiatric treatment as a motive for a supposed killing spree.", Mira Anneli Naß

"Europe is lost (...) leaves an oppressive feeling. One photo shows a man whose face is completely masked, another wears dark sunglasses and smokes.", from the article "Nie wieder!" by Amelie Völker in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 05, 2020

For this textile piece, Jonas Höschl adapts the opening
and closing panels of Alexander Kluge’s episodic film Deutschland im Herbst. Kluge’s 1978 film speaks about the cultural climate in the years of RAF terrorism; the quote that precedes the film, however, actually dates from the final weeks of the Second World War and builds a historical arc from National Socialism to the German Autumn 1977. By reproducing the panels in an almost cinematic format, Höschl removes them from their context—suddenly the question of guilt comes into
focus, and the question whether political violence can be viewed in isolation as a purely moral problem.

Jonas Höschl
Das Verschwinden der Hauswartsfrau des Vaters von
Alexander Kluge (2025)
Acrylic + fabric
115 x 140 cm

Thanks to Sabrina Zeltner, Johannes Nussbaum, Nick Romeo Reimann, Willelm De Haan, Sabrina Reuschl, Linda Sakallah, Tannhäuser Kreis, Spring Break Art Residency and AVISO Magazine.