ANNE LASS
‘Triple Seven’
Peter Lav Gallery, Copenhagen
01.03.2013 - 27.04.2013
‘Triple Seven’ is a photographic examination of private casinos and gambling dens in Berlin. Since the beginning of the current financial crisis, the number of casinos has increased very fast. There are today approximately five hundred »gambling dens,« mainly in areas with social problems. This development is not unusual, but it illustrates that there is a correlation between economic crisis, high unemployment, increasing poverty and the spreading of problem gambling.
The gambling dens in Berlin look very different. Many of them seem improvised and are not meant to exist particularly long. Anne Lass has photographed these places without gamblers and gambling machines to underline the puzzling atmosphere that she thinks pervades the suspect places.
The puzzling element is intensified by symbolic references to the gambling world, running like a red thread through the gambling dens, a combination of tarot and magic, religion, natural phenomena and space, all of it helping the gambler to achieve success and wealth.
Since 2011, Lass, motivated by curiosity to examine what is behind the façades, has visited more than one hundred gambling dens. To Lass, the venues represent an illusion of reality, a kind of ambiguous parallel world, intended as a place of refuge, and, at the same time, a place that one should dissociate oneself from. The individual photographs are made in consideration of forms and colours that appear more immediate than concrete and documentary. Through the narrow cut and sharpe gaze of the works, the spaces are interpreted by the fact that the individual elements are emphasized and centred. The world that Lass presents to us is, at the same time, abstract, colourful and exotic – and secret, put aside and somewhat depressing.
Graduating from the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany, in 2007, Anne Lass studied documentary photography in conducting with professor Jörg Sasse. Her works have been exhibited at galleries in Europe, Australia and the United States, such as C/O Berlin, Australian Centre for Photography and GrazMuseum. Her photographs have been purchased by the Danish Arts Foundation and C/O Berlin, and they appear in several publications. After travelling around and an extended stay in the United States, she now lives in Berlin.
© Peter Lav Gallery