Albrecht Becker's Rubber Cock and the Artifice of Photography at Scherben

The exhibition 'body multiple' at Scherben, Berlin, centers on Albrecht Becker's photographic practice, which uses a rubber penis as a stand-in for the self before the camera. Becker, a BDSM practitioner, injected paraffin oil into his own genitalia, rendering it useless while emphasizing masculinity as performance. The show also features works by Jean-Ulrick Désert, Richard Hawkins, and Lucas Odahara, each engaging with themes of otherness, photography's ideological uses, and bodily fragmentation. Désert's series 'NH2K' examines tourist photography and cultural heritage through a skin-colored lederhosen. Hawkins' videos 'Being and its Fetuses' and 'Redon Spider Sequence' use digital collage and AI to explore bodily decomposition, referencing Antonin Artaud and butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. Odahara's folded paper sculptures 'Intervalos' reflect his multiple identities as a queer Japanese-Brazilian artist. The exhibition draws on art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau's critique of photography as a purveyor of dominant ideologies. Becker's self-portraits, including one where he coats himself in black paint, equate otherness with the photographic image.