Openings: »Oran« / »Salon of Photography«

As the granddaughter of a »Pied-Noir« (a term used to describe the French population in Algeria during the violent French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962), Margot Wallard seeks to reflect the fluidity and mutability of memory and to expand it through a new perspective.
During her visits to Oran between 2018 and 2020, she explored the city with her camera and, while her biographical search for traces of the past, encountered a new generation: present, complex, and self-determined. This resulted in portrait series centered around the Bonbon Café, she photographed street scenes, urban vegetation, and the still-evident traces of the colonial past in the cityscape.
In her exhibition, Margot Wallard interweaves her grandmother’s photo archive with her own images from Algeria and with photographs she took of her grandmother during her final years in France.

We want to celebrate the milestone of “200 Years of Photography” with an exhibition that offers an engaging and humorous glimpse into the studios of Salzburg photographers. The exhibition concept is based on an invitation to each artist to identify the earliest work within their own oeuvre and make it available for the exhibition, either as a vintage print or as a reconstruction.
The curatorial idea is founded on the assumption that this approach will make visible and open to discussion the diverse starting points and artistic concepts from which each photographer’s subsequent body of work developed. The number of participants will determine the form of the presentation: a “Salon de Paris” of the 19th century, characterized by an excessive spatial and conceptual concentration of highly diverse personalities and formal approaches.