This photographic portrait and interview series has been continuously realised since 2013, initially entitled b o s s | working women. Since then, artist and photographer Katrin Ribbe portrayed and interviewed more than 40 women bosses across Germany and abroad. Self-employed women’s reality of life, often pushed to the fringes of public discourse, now takes centre stage.

The series has been shown in numerous institutions and within a variety of contexts. In 2016, for the first time, the series was shown as a solo exhibition at Galerie für Fotografie e. V. in Hanover, Germany, in cooperation with the foundation Leben & Umwelt / Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Niedersachsen. In the same year, it was nominated for the Kulturförderpreis (promotion of culture award), awarded by Evangelische Landeskirche Niedersachsen. 2017 saw another solo exhibition at Forum Gestaltung e. V. in Magdeburg, Germany, sponsored by the Office for Gender Equality of Saxony-Anhalt’s state capital, Magdeburg. For the exhibition in Magdeburg, Katrin Ribbe portrayed six women from the city, and interviewed them about their realities of life as women bosses, about their life journeys, and about possible gender-based disadvantages they experience(d).

In 2019, the series was invited for the autumn exhibition Identitäten (Identities) of Salon Salder / Neue Kunst aus Niedersachsen, held at the Städtische Museen Salzgitter (Municipal Museums of Salzgitter), with 3 portraits being acquired for the museum’s collection.

In 2020, Katrin Ribbe was invited by Kaunas Photography Gallery as artist-in-residence, with the objective of portraying and interviewing women bosses from Lithuania. It was in Kaunas that the idea took hold to open the project on an international scale, and to include perspectives from artists around the world, who would portray and interview women bosses in their respective communities.

Likewise in 2020, b o s s was invited to FAVORITEN Festival in Dortmund, Germany, as part of the group exhibition Arbeit am Apparat (Work on the Apparatus), sponsored by the city’s office for culture. In 2022, it was shown at the queer-feminist multimedial arts festival BritneyX in Cologne, Germany. Dortmund and Cologne, respectively, saw the first open-air installation of the portraits.

As a continuation of these first open-air exhibitions, and in collaboration with the distinct artistic styles of Kamila Kobierzyńska from Poznán, Poland and Aya Fujioka from Hiroshima, Japan, b o s s | working women will now be shown at Kulturdreieck Hannover, expanded to include international artistic perspectives, and exhibited in the public space.

(Translation: Swantje Möller)