Foam 3h: Regine Petersen - Find a Fallen Star
20 March - 3 May 2015

Regine Petersen (b. 1976, Germany) was selected by an international jury as the most promising photographer at the Unseen international photography fair in 2014. As winner of the Outset|Unseen Exhibition Fund, Petersen has been awarded an exhibition in Foam's 3h space for young talent. Foam is proud to present her long-term  project Find a Fallen Star in this space. Petersen is inspired by stories about falling meteorites and makes use of her strong narrative qualities in her work. With her approach she creates a multi-layered narrative in which she integrates science and art, building a bridge between the past and the future.  She thus investigates both how memory works versus history, and the relationship between the ordinary and the inexplicable. In her publication with the same name, Find a Fallen Star, which appears with the exhibition, she combines her own photos with historic and found images, texts and space-related objects.

In Find A Fallen Star, Petersen uses stories about falling meteorites as a starting point for her multilayered narrative works: a rock which crashed through the roof of a house in Alabama and stuck a woman, a group of children in post-War Germany who found a meteorite and a recent event in India. Petersen visited these places, interviewed eyewitnesses and elaborated on their stories. She supplements her photographic observations with found documents and interviews. Petersen views her work as chapters in a greater story. Just as a meteor can be considered a time capsule, each of her chapters alludes to a specific place and time.

The first chapter of the project, Stars Fell on Alabama, won the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Prize for Contemporary German Photography in 2012. She was also selected as a finalist for the Prix HSBC prize for photography in 2014. In 2009, Petersen completed a Master's degree in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London. Since then, her work has been shown in several international solo and group exhibitions, including the Rencontres d'Arles, France (2012) and the Science Operations Center, UA Lunar & Planetary Lab, Tucson, USA (2011).

This exhibition has been organized as part of the the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund. The Outset|Unseen Exhibition Fund is a unique partnership between Unseen Photo Fair and Outset Netherlands, providing a new institutional platform for emerging talent. Scouting the fair before opening hours, each year the selection committee selects one artist exhibiting at Unseen for a solo exhibition at Foam.

The Foam 3h exhibitions are supported by the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund and the Van Bijleveltstichting.

www.foam.org/press/2015/regine-petersen