Camera Austria 161 April 2023

• CARLOS KONG
  An Image Is a Migrant Is a Monument Is a Memory
• AYKAN SAFOĞLU
• ALEXANDRA JUHASZ
  A Media Practice as Harm Reduction
• SKY HOPINKA
• ROSALYN D’MELLO
  Milking Time
• CHIARA BARDELLI NONINO
  The Garden of Forking Pasts
• ALBA ZARI
• SARAH ZÜRCHER
  A Diasporic Perspective through the Lens of Memory, Displacement, and Maritime Traffic

The works presented in Camera Austria International no. 161 take a look at the charged realm of belonging, dislocation, migration, and identity. Compiled here are artistic positions that mediate these themes in very different ways, that focus on more than just the representation of an individual. Instead, the featured artists at times also operate in collaborative contexts and incorporate archival ma­terials and personal oral histories, as well as texts, objects, and found items into their work. Not least, the works presented involve questions related to visualizing communities brought together by family ties or similar interests that elude our everyday gaze, to the role of photographic and filmic images in imparting historical narratives, including suppressed ones, and to a critical examination of how the categories of identity and belonging are constructed and passed on over different generations.

Starting from Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Berlin Child­hood around 1900), a volume of vignettes that Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930s, Carlos Kong elaborates how Aykan Safoğlu brings together images from photographic archives and transgenerational experiences and traumas as well as autobiographical experiences in his work. “Over the past decade, Aykan Safoğlu’s artistic practice has forged a distinctive photographic language for picturing spectral memories, of the artist’s upbringing in Istanbul and his lived experiences of migration between Turkey and Germany. Safoğlu’s migratory gaze is at once retrospective and anticipatory with regard to his specific historical circumstances.”

Sky Hopinka develops a “media practice as harm production,” as Alexandra Juhasz phrases it, in his video Dislocation Blues (2017), a work that is interpreted by the author in the context of the “Philadelphia Principles” of the artist collective Mad Ecologies. In the video, Hopinka selectively observes the protest camp erected along the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota from April 2016 to February 2017, also giving voice to two of the involved activists. A central topic in this manifesto is advocating for a better, solidary society that is united in its shared concerns and its desire to realize collective dreams, despite all the individual differences. “At the camp, people made family across differences, in struggle, in protest. Not for them, but for a new and shifting us.”

Rosalyn D’Mello reflects in her autotheoretical essay “Milking Time” on how her work as an author has changed since the birth of her son and the extent to which the process of writing and putting her female subjectivity down in writing has since then been integrated in her day-to-day life: “Part of my reluctance to transcribe my writing comes from the fear of frustration, and the accompanying angst of finally entering the sacred headspace, arriving at its threshold only to have enough time to simply glimpse at the hallowed interior without being able to inhabit it, because, once again, my body and all its attentive faculties were needed.” What thus also comes to bear is her situatedness between her maternal family in India and her partner’s family in South Tyrol, where she has been living since the beginning of the pandemic, and, based on this, the bonds that are woven across continents and generations.

In the projects The Y (2014–16) and Occult (2019), Alba Zari also occupies herself with the history of her family. While in The Y she tries to learn something about the identity of her biological father, whom she has never met, through research and forensic methods, in Occult she attempts to retrace the path of her mother’s life and her entanglements in the sect Children of God, in which the artist also spent the first years of her life. “The work is inevitably multilayered and complex, and it is hard on the viewer as well: you are constantly confronted with hard questions and facts, incessantly reminded of the radical ambiguity of photography, a medium that can serve fiction, propaganda, and truth with the same unwavering zeal,” is how Chiara Bardelli Nonino describes the work.

Sarah Zürcher contextualizes the very complex and multilayered oeuvre of many years of Zineb Sedira, who represented France at the Biennale di Venezia in 2022 and since beginning her artistic work has again and again taken a look at topics related to migration, family bonds, and the complex relationships between France and Algeria. “Constantly fascinated by the notion of movement, displacement, and by issues of origin and authorship, she reconsiders the theme of geographical or cultural uprooting, but also examines it historically, through varied modes of narration that function as envelopes of memory, tied to social, economic, and political dimensions.”

At the end of 2022, Reinhard Braun—who has been part of the Camera Austria project in a wide range of roles since 1992 and took over the management of the institution in 2011 along with Maren Lübbke-Tidow as editor-in-chief (until 2013)—stepped away from his activities as artistic director of Camera Austria and publisher of the magazine Camera Austria International. We look forward to referring back to these many years of collaboration in the future and are pleased that he will be responsible for columns beginning with this issue. Reinhard Braun will henceforth, along and in alternation with Marc Ries, examine canonical books of photo theory in the “Re-Readings,” consider them anew from the perspective of today, and incorporate them into contemporary contemplations of photography. With this issue, we would also like to introduce our new colleague Anna Voswinckel, who joined the Camera Austria team at the beginning of this year and will organize the exhibition program with us starting in the fall of 2023. For the library section in the current issue, with Annelies Štrba’s Shades of Time, she selected a book in the Camera Austria library that initiated a complex examination of the interleaved topics of origins, belonging, and location for her during her photography studies.

As this issue of Camera Austria International is going to print, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, is nearing the end of its first year. Since then, millions of people have been forced to leave the country or live in Ukraine in a reality that no longer has anything to do with the everyday life that they were familiar with before the war. We thus decided to make use of the Forum in this issue to give Ukrainian photographers a voice and invited Kateryna Radchenko, director and curator of the Odesa Photo Days festival, to present the work of six young Ukrainian artists.

Susan Sontag posed the question of “. . . the influence of photos in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about, and ultimately what evaluations are attached to these conflicts.” There are nonetheless again and again catastrophes that pass through this—always also ideological—visual filter, as the reports from southern Turkey and northwest Syria are presently doing owing to the earthquake in February this year, whose aftereffects remain impossible for us to imagine. More than 42,000 people (status on February 16) have lost their lives in it, while tens of thousands have been wounded or are fleeing the totally destroyed areas. We would like to invite you to support organizations close to you that are committed to providing humanitarian aid in Syria and Turkey (and also in Ukraine) in order to help people on site. At the same time, we would also like to urge you to remain critical when following the rhetoric about a politics of the other, which is again and again implanted in a parasitical manner in the reporting on such catastrophes and undermines our desires for empathy, care, and fellowship.

Margit Neuhold, Jakob Thaller, Christina Töpfer
March 2023

Cover: Zineb Sedira, detail from: Dreams Have No Titles, 2022, looped video projection in cinema set design and vintage chairs; Dreams Have No Titles, 2022, set design created for the remake of the film F for Fake by Orson Welles, 1973. Exhibition view at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, co-curated by Yasmina Reggad, Sam Bardaouil, and Till Fellrath; general commissioner: Institut français. Photo: Thierry Bal.