Valerie Schmidt  is an artist, photographer and professor based in Germany. Her practice explores the body as a site of physical and psychological affect, working at the intersection of photography, performance and visual theory. Through staged and performative situations, she examines gesture, movement and bodily expression, questioning the legibility of body language and the relationship between conscious and unconscious action. Her work approaches photography as an experimental process of constructing images and exploring emotional thresholds, perception and empathy.

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Case Studies in Falling

The work explores the moment of tipping as a photographic and performative event. It originated during a residency in Istanbul, where participants were asked to let themselves fall from a standing position onto a mattress in a controlled manner, while simultaneously resisting the instinct to break the fall. The resulting photographs form the starting point for an ongoing investigation into bodily states of transition.



The focus is not on the fall itself, but on the moment when balance is exceeded. In this brief interval between stability and collapse, the body loses its familiar order without fully surrendering to the fall. Photography makes this fleeting state of suspension visible, transforming movement into a temporary form.

The individual photographs are composed into diptychs in which originally independent bodily postures enter into relation with one another. The image pairs create moments of mirroring, confrontation and rhythmic correspondence. The bodies seem to move towards one another, avoid each other, or be on the verge of colliding. This creates a tension between individual movement and collective choreography.

The body appears here as a temporary sculpture, taking form through a conscious act of letting go somewhere between balance and loss of control. While individual parts of the body still seem to find support on the ground, others dissolve into a slight motion blur. What becomes visible is a state in which the laws of physics, performative action and the photographic moment intersect.

The work also plays with the possibilities and limitations of photographic representation: while the head and feet appear to be frozen in the image, the body simultaneously dissolves into motion blur, creating a state of suspension between stillness and movement.













installation at Kunsthalle Trier during the Rhineland Palatinate Triennale, 2026







installation during “short loud ohm” at das Gift, Berlin