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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Schemen uns ähnlicher Wesen und ihr ungeordnetes Pläsier



(Shadows of Beings Like Us and Their Disordered Pleasure) brings together photographic works that emerge from an open-ended process between research, performative experimentation, and material exploration. At its centre is the question of the conditions under which bodies and things become visible—or withdraw from visibility. The photographs focus on fleeting states in which materials, bodies, and objects develop a peculiar presence for a brief moment; appearances that move between figuration and abstraction, familiarity and estrangement.



The title of the series is taken from Charlotte Warsen’s poetry collection Plage. As in her text, we encounter beings that appear similar to us and yet remain inaccessible: “Distorted by their own moods and gestures / their ways of living remain entirely hidden from us.” The photographs follow this poetic logic. Fabrics, paper, liquids, and everyday materials seem to produce faces, postures, or bodies without ever becoming unequivocally human. They oscillate between the animate and the inanimate, between projection and an agency of their own.

The camera captures not so much objects as moments of becoming and disappearing. The images do not show what is, but what occurs for a brief moment. In this sense, the series connects to Georges Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the image as a site of apparition: the visible remains open-ended, always pointing towards something that simultaneously withdraws from view. The photographic forms encounter us like symptoms or shadows: they evoke memories, affects, and bodily associations without ever allowing themselves to be fully deciphered.



The series continues Valerie Schmidt’s longstanding engagement with corporeality, affect, and the politics of the image. While earlier works examined historical gestures of loss of control, the focus here shifts towards the unruly materiality of bodies and things. Photography appears as a medium that does not fix fragile forms, but allows them to become visible in the moment of their appearance—as shadows of beings like us, whose ways of living remain hidden from us.