RALPH BAIKER
Ralph Baiker was born in 1966 in Filderstadt-Bonlanden, Germany. He is a conceptual artist working with the medium of photography. Fundamental to his work is the idea that people make sense of their reality and their environment by giving it cultural meaning, employing certain visual – architectural, regional, historical, linguistic sign systems. Usually, the ori¬gin of such sign systems is traced back to their suspected roots in an authentic experience. Yet in our globalised world signs clash on a daily basis, making it impossible to speak of one authentic origin. Instead, sign systems acquire diverse and even contradictory levels of meaning. In his photographs Baiker searches for the fault lines where sign systems meet. Here people experience the loss of a seeming authenticity while at the same time a trans¬formation of the sign systems takes place that people in turn consider truly authentic. Ralph Baiker is based in Hamburg.