Currency: Photography Beyond Capture

Currency: Photography Beyond Capture
Deichtorhallen Hamburg—Halle für aktuelle Kunst
Deichtorstraße 1–2,
20095 Hamburg
20.5. – 18.9.2022
deichtorhallen.de

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Currency: Photography Beyond Capture explores conceptual engagements with photography in the “retinal age.” In our accelerated era of circulation and instrumentation, images not only act as records of events and imprints of experience but fundamentally shape acts of both seeing and being seen. Approaching photographs as contextual frames for narrative invention, the exhibition critically considers how knowledge has been sought through the camera over the course of its history and reimagined by artists and photographers through conceptual and poetic approaches to the medium. Currency looks at how these practitioners have challenged the perception and value of photographic images and investigated the extended lives, temporalities, and materialities of image cultures beyond the moment of capture. 

The exhibition weaves experimental modes of appearance, multisensory evocation, and archival and documentary practice as novel possibilities and vocabularies for seeing and interpreting. In staging works by twenty-nine artists and photographers, the exhibition draws connections across geographies and eras, tracing intergenerational and transnational affinities through several motifs: the deconstruction and juxtaposition of photographic canons; countermapping in the Anthropocene across landscapes of extractive capitalism, military occupation, and appropriation; tenderness as a relational framework for photography; and material explorations into the medium’s alchemical processes. These motifs structure Currency: Photography Beyond Capture and offer through lines across a range of perspectives.  

Curated by Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti, Gabriella Beckhurst Feijoo, Oluremi C. Onabanjo

deichtorhallen.de