The action photographically recorded here is dangerous. If the jumper loses his balance he will fall inexorably into the depths below, yet, if he doesn't gather enough momentum the jump will appear half-hearted and the climax crucial to the pictures will be lost. It can almost literally be claimed that Sebastian Stumpf i san acrobat. However, it isn't just Stumpf's uncanny mastery of his body that allows him to carry out feats that waver somewhere between peril and arrogance. movement in all its different forms is in fact a kind of leitmotif of Stumpf's photographs and videos. Between this rising and falling his work probes as wide a spectrum as possible of motion - motion as a means of appropriating un/locations. Anyone who who makes if he were jumping over the railing of an elevated walkway while capturing the movement in a photograph will incite irritation and potentially even fear in viewers, though the images never allow us ti draw any conclusions about what finally happens to the actor. The resulting pictures do not just inspire a reflection on the space being surveyed by means of the artist's body: one is challenged to a far greater extent to consider the conditions if the visible, that is, of the pictures themselves. 

Siegel, Steffen. "Passage." Ed. Richter, Angelika. Sebastian Stumpf: All These Walls. Berlin: argobooks, 2010. 

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