Kunstverein in Hamburg

The Day Will Come When Photography Revises

2015
Hamburg, DE
Type: Exhibition Architecture

Commissioned by Bettina Steinbrügge & Amelie Zadeh

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Credits
  • Spatial design by: Studio Miessen
  • Project Leader: Markus Miessen, Berta Cusó, Estelle Jullian
  • Team: Paul Bourigan
  • Curated by: Bettina Steinbrügge & Amelie Zadeh
  • Production Team: Corinna Koch, Robert Görss
  • Photography by: Fred Dott

19.6. – 13.9.2015

6th Triennial of Photography

Peggy Buth, Charlotte Dualé, Harun Farocki, Abrie Fourie, Anne Hardy, Inga Kerber, Philipp König, Susanne Kriemann, Michael Part, Josephine Pryde, Clunie Reid, Max Schaffer, Dirk Stewen, Una Szeemann u. Bohdan Stehlik, Toilet Paper Magazine, Tris Vonna-Michell, Lidwien van de Ven
The Kunstverein in Hamburg raises six questions about the future of photography, which focus on the relevance of this medium within contemporary visual discourses. To think about the actuality and future of photography means to understand it as a subjunctive, in which within the framework of the exhibition and publication various artistic practices are discussed. Different generations of artists explore the photographic and its manifestations. In six exhibition chapters these processes are shown: the chapters are intended to provide spaces of potentiality to check and reformulate one’s own thoughts about photography.

Chapter I presents the thinking of the photographic as a form of possibility: How do images articulate themselves as events? What occurs prior to the actual photograph, while looking at it, and afterwards? When does the photographic commence and when does “the image”, the materialization, intervene?

Chapter II deals with materialization in photography: Are there signs of the photographic separating itself from its own materiality, the photograph itself? Is it evading it? Can one speak of an absence of the photograph and a presence of the photographic?

Questions related to “materiality” are inevitably confronted with the image floods of digital and virtual spaces and the “right to one’s mage”. In this sense, chapter III is concerned with how image ideologies are generated by analogue and digital flows of images. Who can maintain an overview and who has the right to the image? Who censors? With which new forms of public and private do we have to engage with?

Chapter IV inquires after the spaces in which the photographic manifests itself: Which spaces can photography still access? Through which dispositifs is it read? To what extent is photography a medium of closeness and of distancing?

New contexts of meaning emerge in the way photography is treated today: Chapter V delves into the forms of knowledge and scientificity generated by new image practices. What role does the reputed indexicality play in the process? How can a new digital understanding of the image be derived from this?

Photographic images narrate (hi)stories in a different way and influence historical perception: In chapter VI we therefore ask whether images and their history can be conceived and read synchronously. Do photographic images perhaps write a new history? Or can images be read as texts and vice versa?

The individual chapters outline the relevance of the photographic within contemporary image discourses and thus point to the present-day relevance and the future of photography.

Curated by Bettina Steinbrügge and Amelie Zadeh. Exhibition architecture by Studio Miessen. The exhibition takes place in cooperation with the Landesgalerie Linz. It is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, the Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, the British Council and the Bureau des arts plastiques of the Institut français and the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication.