Raisan Hameed

In Monika Orpik's work titled Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road, we are invited to engage with migration and transience with her stark black-and-white photographs that document various states of impermanence along the Polish-Belarus border. The Białowieża National Forest is the center of Orpik’s meditation on life at a time of political oppression and transformation.

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Peter Pflügler’s work Now is not the right time equally begins with a forest and a deep desire to use photography as a means to investigate and render previously hidden secrets visible. Strikingly coherent and honest in his approach, Pflügler’s work intimately instigates a conversation about suicide, secrecy, and the suddenness of time’s ongoing passing.

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Raisan Hameed focuses on the materiality of images in his work, Zer-Störung which, as the name suggests, looks at the processes of destruction, and what remains are documents formed by various layers of time as open questions and scars. Starting with the combination of personal and archival imagery from his hometown Mosul, Hammed’s work engages with the photograph’s power to obscure time and meaning.

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Bärbel Reinhardt’s work draws from photographic stratification. Working across various modes of presentation, Reinhardt’s work plays with the imaginary quality of the photograph, looking at the contemporary cut-and-paste visual queues as signposts for a recyclable iconography. In her project, again still erratics perhaps, the artist gathers, deconstructs, cuts, assembles, photographs, re-photographs, and repurposes these to create a dense visual space where different times and techniques collaborate.

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In artist and author Marie Hervé’s work, history is both completed and open-ended – her tendency to work with a combination of archival and personal imagery anchors her narratives into past, present, and future. Her project The island on the island is a meditation on the Mediterranean territory’s beauty and transience. The act of researching and retracing the past, becomes a means through which to engage with the unstable nature of the present.