Der Raum zwischen zwei Bildern

With Anita Witek/Gregor Neuerer, Herwig Kempinger, Margherita Spiluttini and Joachim Brohm as guest curators of four exhibitions in our anniversary year 2006 – 25 years of FOTOHOF – we want to continue the founding myth of the FOTOHOF, namely that it was founded and organised from the grassroots, by the photographers themselves. The above-mentioned guest curators each represent very different artistic profiles and have been associated with the FOTOHOF over many years and projects. From their respective positions, all of them can be expected to provide a correspondingly differentiated view of contemporary Austrian photography at home and abroad in their selection. Joachim Brohm will be in charge of an international exhibition. Anita Witek and Gregor Neuerer will open this series of Künstler:innen-Kuratoren:innen exhibitions with the show “Der Raum zwischen zwei Bildern”.
“Der Raum zwischen zwei Bildern” attempts to relate living conditions and local experience to their media representation and legibility by means of four installation projects. We were interested in presenting approaches to the properties of photography and video, which stand as an interface between everyday experience and its excerpted and sometimes fragmentary, pictorial recording – as an interface between artistic working practice and the active participation of the visitor. To what extent do photography and video assume the role of translator in this? What information is taken up by their media grid and what remains invisible?
The exhibition attempts to address not only the role and use of photography, but also the cultural, social and political behaviour that goes hand in hand with it, which builds on the possibility and knowledge of recording and distributing images. We therefore understand the works in the exhibition as spaces of action, as spaces that form between different levels of experience and make an ambiguous, semantically dense image legible.