Someone else ate it.

Judith Samen’s photographs have often been traced back to Old Master models—vanitas depictions, still lifes, and bourgeois portraits. The iconographic references have been scrutinized down to the smallest detail. The existential, timeless dimension of the motifs, as well as the intimacy of the relationship between the image and the viewer—which can border on the embarrassing—have also frequently been the subject of interest.

One blind spot in previous interpretations is the aspect of Samen’s art that relates to the contemporary art scene—that is, its position within the coordinate system of current trends. The fact that the artist has always demonstrated a keen sense for these trends is already evident from her first solo exhibition in 1992. Under the title Explicit Food Photography Samen didn't exhibit his paintings in an art gallery, but rather at a French fry stand in Bottrop Barbecue on Ostring. The title was a paradoxical paraphrase of that term—yet to be coined—which would come to characterize a defining trend of the 21st century: food porn.

In the technologically advanced yet nostalgically Neolithic-flavored tribal society of the global village, foraging, cooking, and eating have once again become existential imperatives. That is why they must be celebrated, staged, discussed, and documented around the clock—whether through cooking shows or food photography distributed on social media. Young people are already identifying with their Paleo diet the way indigenous peoples once identified with their totem animals, and new social groups—such as LOHAS—are already forming around culinary taboos. A cultural food chain stretches from Lady Gaga’s meat dress to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s relational curry recipes to the greasy hit song “Bratwurstzange” by the meat-loving Rummelsnuff. But food is supposed to be at its best when it’s naked, free of all the trappings of civilization. People crave carrots of primal virility, tomatoes as voluptuous as the Venus of Willendorf. Michel Houellebecq wrote in his novel Map and Area, in which, significantly, contemporary art photography plays an important role, draws a parallel between the boom in the art market and a return to the “good old days”: In the France of the near future, people cherish regional cuisine, specialize in vintage professions, and make a living from agriculture and the influx of wealthy tourists from Asia (unless, of course, they’re big-name stars).

Samen’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between humans and food—which has spanned the archaic and the absurd since the 1990s—proves to be both prophetic and seismographic in these contexts. When Samen depicts food in her photographs, it is simple, regional, and rustic. When she depicts people, they are predominantly “everyday,” unclothed individuals. In doing so, she performs a balancing act between participation and detachment. She stands, indeed, in the midst of the contemporary resonance chamber, filled with collective munching and populated by social exhibitionists. Yet it is precisely there that, by virtue of her sober, concise, yet humorous style—even in the most unsettling scenes—she counteracts, on the one hand, the glamorous, fetishizing gesture of professional food pornographers and, on the other, the compulsive, lapidary gesture of the inflationary Me-and-my-food selfies and other amateur exhibitionist nonsense, on the other hand.

With her exhibition at the Kunstraum Moabit Bakery Contemporary art and archaic food are united in two distinct ways. The exhibition space is a former bakery—and thus a symbolic site of the transition from artisanal, production-based trade to a service-oriented, creative, and gentrifying industry. Here, too—as was once the case in the French fry stand—there is an implicit diagnostic element regarding the present: a bakery becomes an art space solely to house an artist who, in turn, works with baked goods and bakes herself (Stuten made according to Grandma Ursula’s recipe, featured in the accompanying performance Dough Disaster – What Happened and What We Ate). "Every victorious second nature becomes a first," Nietzsche wrote in his Anachronistic Reflections II. Everything must change so that everything can stay the same: Where there was bread, there shall be art; where there is art, there shall be bread.

While artists such as Rosemarie Trockel—whose aesthetic and discursive framework Samen draws upon—now favor installations that are as complex as they are diffusely murmuring and intricately intertwined, Samen remains committed to reduction and conciseness—well aware that the simplest questions are often the hardest to answer, and that the simplest constellations, upon closer inspection, frequently lead to complicated entanglements and remote contexts. A good example of this is the work on display in Moabit Breast Buns. On the one hand, this humorously alludes to a totemic—that is, a kinship-based—relationship between humans and food; in the age of consumer culture, it is only logical that eating totems is no longer taboo. At the same time, Samen emphasizes the reflexive-contemplative—and thus implicitly critical or ironic—distance between humans and food. While advocates critical of anthropocentrism currently OOO (object-oriented ontology) who, summoning all their academic authority, attempt to overcome the traditional distinction between human beings (subjects) and nonhuman beings (objects), Samen’s photographs consistently maintain a sense of tension. Whether in Linzer Cake, O.T. (large roll), Sausage Stool or Rusks Bra – The totemic closeness between humans and the object of their consumption—one could interpret this as the subtext of the photographs—is in no way at odds with a differential, even instrumental, relationship. You are what you eat—but you can only be what you eat because what you eat is something else, someone else. To paraphrase Rimbaud without regard for grammar: I is eaten by someone else. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that one eats what one is, since we have long known that we form material communities with our food. And at the very latest since NASA has been working on generating food from human excrement, the statement “one eats what one is” has taken on a double meaning. Needless to say, there are also religious undertones to this.

Bazon Brock once remarked that, in the conventional understanding, transubstantiation refers to “mythical unity”—to “the eater becoming identical with what is eaten.” Thus, the eater is constantly in danger of transforming into that which he appropriates through eating. The connection between transubstantiation and transformation has since ancient times been symbolized by a snake eating its own tail. This symbol does not refer to the metabolic cycle as a form of relationship between the world and organisms, but rather signifies the state of fundamental impossibility of differentiating between subject and object.” In times of—in light of what Brock has said, not really new—actor-network theories and similar doctrines (OOO) transubstantiation appears less as a mystical and sacred phenomenon and more as a self-evident, everyday, natural process. In this regard, Samen’s works certainly evoke associations with the supposed phantasm of transubstantiation. However, one will search in vain for the cannibalistic aspect that pushes toward indistinction and a final transformation of essence. The fundamental separation between beings persists within their interconnectedness, somewhat like in the most sophisticated and progressive Christian concept to date: the doctrine of the Trinity. At its core, this doctrine simply states that identity and difference are two sides of the same coin.

Against the backdrop of the trend toward identification with food in everyday culture on the one hand, and the blurring of the distinction between humans and objects in the culture of knowledge on the other, Samens’ staged photographs occupy an intermediate position. In them, human beings neither dissolve entirely into post- or transhumanist visions nor do they, in the humanist tradition, rise above the world of things. It is precisely this unstable, uncertain intermediate realm that must exist for the engagement with food as “incorporated knowledge” to make any sense at all: “There is a great deal of knowledge in everything we eat. We eat knowledge and even ignorance. This connection makes eating a profoundly philosophical realm of knowledge.” *Samen* conveys an idea of this realm of knowledge precisely because its motifs differential Interlocking It emphasizes the distinction between human and food, subject and object—and not, for example, hybrid beings composed of human and bread or human and sausage. Cognition presupposes that there is a difference between the knower and the known, no matter how intertwined the two may be. Similarly, photography presupposes that there is a difference between the photographer and the subjects of their interest, even though photographers are, of course, a manipulative part of the world they depict. Cognition, philosophy, and photography, for their part, are closely related: “The photographer’s gesture is a philosophical gesture, or to put it another way: since the invention of photography, it has become possible to philosophize not only through the medium of words but also through photographs. The reason for this is that the act of photographing is an act of seeing—that is, it is what the ancient thinkers theoria mentioned, and that this results in a picture that, according to these thinkers, idea "was mentioned." In this sense, Samen's images can be interpreted as thought-images that subtly reveal essential trends of the present—precisely because they do not become subsumed within it.