The still life as a portrait, in which the objects can be read as a coded representation of identity: in his 21-part work A Possible Ordering, Andrzej Steinbach creates an experimental arrangement with supermarket goods — bread, milk, products whose names refer to regions and cities, organic fruit and vegetables, toothpaste, and mineral water. These items are put in staged relationships with one another and combined in different ways. How do these constellations of things reflect human individuality, including social status and lifestyle choices? The products we purchase give the algorithms of Silicon Valley a read on us, but how do we decode this set of ordinary products ourselves? It is a game that is at once both abstract and concrete.

Andrzej Steinbach, born 1983 in Czarnków (Poland), lives and works in Berlin. He has won various awards, including the 2017 Federal Prize for Art Students, the 2016 Saxon Scholarship Programme for Master Students, and the Wüstenrot Foundation’s Promotional Programme for Documentary Photography 11.