Daring the Unfamiliar Gaze

The Photoszene Residency “Artist Meets Archive” Enters Its Third Round

In the digital age, the origination of photos and their dissemination are assuming dizzying forms – but what, of all these shots, is actually of relevance? To us today and for the future? We are (still) unable to answer these questions. But we can pose them retroactively and look at the photos that past generations have kept for us. Cologne offers almost infinite opportunities to this end, because here, we are not only living in a city of photography, but also in a city with an enormously high density of different archives and collections. But what knowledge can we glean from these image storehouses? Is the knowledge that they convey equally retrievable for every beholder? And how static, or nevertheless re-interpretable, are the narratives that are codified in the archives? Normally, scientists take a look at these archives and collections and analyse, describe and categorize them. We, however, wanted to dare and encourage the other, completely foreign gaze. That was the hour of birth of our program “Artist Meets Archive”, six years ago.

With Naoya Hatakeyama from Japan, Lebohang Kganye from South Africa, Pablo Lerma from Spain and Lilly Lulay from Germany/Belgium, for the very third time we have invited international artists to delve into these image bundles, explore them for themselves, and develop their own artistic positions out of them. At the same time, the archives and collections which they work with could hardly be more varied: the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst and the Rheinisches Bildarchiv.

The common feature of their works, though, is that they all deal with the different variants of visibility which come into play in photography. The topic of visibility ranges from a female perspective (#femalegaze) on colonial contexts through to the tourist gaze (#touristgaze), which is laid down in a society’s collective visual memory. Visibility includes the relationship in which the artificial seeing (#algorithmicgaze) of an image recognition program stands to human seeing, and ultimately refers, also, to how the gaze of power (#gazeofpower) ensures what remains hidden in photographs and the archives that house them.

On the following pages you will read extracts from interviews held by students on the “Photography Studies and Practice” Master’s course at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen with Naoya Hatakeyama, Lebohang Kganye, Pablo Lerma and Lilly Lulay, in which the latter explain their different artistic approaches and perspectives.

You will find the interviews in full at www.photoszene.de