Conceptual nominee

Plastic has invaded our entire living environment: In the human body, in our food, in animals, the landscape, air, lakes, rivers and the oceans. Along with the climate crisis, the plastic crisis is one of the biggest problems of our time.
Probably no other object is as symbolic of the global plastic crisis as the plastic bag: it is the epitome of our throwaway society, stands for global pollution, excessive waste and excessive consumption.

Since the 01.01.2022, it is prohibited in Germany to put classic plastic bags on the market. However, particularly lightweight plastic carrier bags, are exempt from the ban. In Germany alone, around three billion (Drei Miliarden) of these bags are consumed every year.
LK has been collecting fully functional shirt bags on the street since 2014. All the collected bags, by now tens of hundreds, lay on the street like garbage.

Sculptural, photographic images were created from these bags, which - combined with compact information in the form of quotes from online articles in major newspapers, authorities and environmental organizations about plastic - serve to educate and clarify the global plastic problem.

Drei Milliarden (2019-22) 300 bags in 300 days & quotes from 11 topics at www.instagram.com/drei_milliarden/

Lars Klingenberg, born 1978 in Aachen, lives and works in Hamburg.

Since 2014, Lars Klingenberg has been working self-taught on independent, conceptual-artistic long-term projects, creating, among other things, "Social and Political Sculptures of the Metropolis". Using photographic tools and iterations (partly from objects found or collected on the street), to reflect social states and poverty in Germany. The comparative, objective, and serial depictions are based on a veristic approach of New Objectivity.

Driven by the advancing social inequality in German society, escalating consumerism and the Anthropocene, Lars Klingenberg works on a counter-design to the representations, aesthetic distortions and reality shifts in contemporary documentary photography, which have been shaped by educated bourgeois worldviews and neoliberalism since the 1990s.
"Social Objectivity" is a return to the "clear objectivity photography" that emerged in the 1920s, shows socio-politically relevant and socio-critical content and sees itself as a counter-current to thematic ownership of foreign cultures and life realities in an artistic context.

In 2022 Lars Klingenberg initiated the "Poverty Working Group", a platform for regular exchange and the development of new project ideas with experts from the fields of social science and sociology.