T(Ä/A)USCHEN is a photographic meditation on illusion, exchange, and the commodification of human life. Drawing on the subtle linguistic play between tauschen (to exchange) and täuschen (to deceive), the work uses the streetscapes and architecture of Frankfurt’s red-light district adjacent to its financial district as a metaphor for how labor, capital, desire, and deception intertwine in late-stage capitalism. What at first appears familiar — urban forms, neon, storefronts, thoroughfares — becomes uncanny under the lens of conceptual scrutiny, revealing how the veneer of economic exchange is inseparable from the mechanics of deception.
Captured through false-color infrared imagery, the series intentionally shifts visual perception without distorting color relationships, inviting viewers to see the everyday anew while underscoring how alternate ways of seeing often lead to the same underlying dynamics of power, extraction, and misrecognition. In false-color, commonplace surfaces veer toward the spectral, and familiar spaces become sites of latent tension — revealing what is usually hidden beneath the shimmering surfaces of commerce and control.
The photographic framing of red-light and financial districts together becomes a visual allegory for the general prostitution of labor — a concept highlighted in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — where both the worker and the capitalist are implicated in systems that commodify bodies, desire, and exchange. In this context, T(Ä/A)USCHEN does not merely juxtapose two adjacent urban zones, but uses them as a critical field in which to examine how contemporary life is shaped by invisible contracts, coerced transactions, and the seductive scripts of economic value.
Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes — and the latter’s abomination is still greater — the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Conceived & Photography by: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 05/13
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