In the new edition of Artist Meets Archive, the participating institutions bring together photographic genres as diverse as colonialist imagery, private photographs from the Nazi era, and travel photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Seemingly disparate, they are all part of our individual as well as collective visual memory and raise the question of which ideas of the world and values they still convey today and how we can deal prudently with this visual heritage. How can we preserve photographs in their contexts and at the same time be aware of the responsibility of giving these images new terms? What of what is depicted is private and what is public? If we consider the staged photographs of countries traveled through, National Socialist propaganda images, and supposedly casual snapshots of everyday life in the past, it is once again a question of who is telling the stories of these images and in what tense relationship the narratives stand to one another.
A new feature in the third edition is the AMA jr. project, which in cooperation with the NEXT! Festival, allows young people to participate in artistic practice through the involvement of a group of pupils.
Research Meets Artist
A public symposium entitled "Research Meets Artist" on the opening weekend of the Photostzene-Festival 2023 flanks the exhibition programme of Artist Meets Archive #3. On 13 May 2023, researchers from various disciplines will meet artists at the Rheinisches Bildarchiv. Their keynote lectures and the subsequent dialogues between researcher and artist will thus bring an academic perspective to artistic practice.
The symposium in English takes place in cooperation of the International Photoscene with the DGPh / Section History and Archives and the Rheinisches Bildarchiv.
The Artist Meets Archive programme is supported by the City of Cologne, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Kunststiftung NRW.
AMA Meets Folkwang Uni
As part of the cooperation with the Folkwang University of the Arts Essen, in early 2023 Naoya Hatakeyama, Lebohang Kganye, Pablo Lerma and Lilly Lulay were interviewed about their artistic practice and their residency projects. They were conducted by students in the M.A. programme "Photography Studies and Research", directed by Prof. Dr. Steffen Siegel. The interviews can be found on the artists' subpages.
Cooperation Partner Artist Meets Archive #3
Together with our partners, the Museum of East Asian Art, the NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne, the Rhenish Picture Archive Cologne and the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, we are able to realise the Artist Meets Archive project.
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Pablo Lerma im NS-Dokumentationszentrum
© buerofuerkunstdokumentation
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Lebohang Kganye und Lucia Halder im RJM
© buerofuerkunstdokumentation
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Naoya Hatakeyama im MOK
© Helena Weber
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Lilly Luly und Inga Schneider im RBA
© buerofuerkunstdokumentation
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Stereographien Sammlung Hatlé
© Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, Tobias Kreusler, rba_d056912_01
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Pablo Lerma im NS-Dokumentationszentrum
© buerofuerkunstdokumentation
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Naoya Hatakeyama im MOK
© Helena Weber
About Artist Meets Archive
The numerous and diverse photography holdings in the collections and archives of the City of Cologne are representative of the medium's omnipresence since its invention.
After the selection of the four artists by a jury consisting of representatives of the participating institutions, the Photoszene and external experts, the artist were invited to Cologne to research the photographic holdings and to develop their own questions within the framework of a residency. During their residencies over the course of the first year, they visited the archives, networked with other artists, and held artist talks and other events that allowed the public to get to know the artists and their work.
The results of their engagement with the photographic collections of the participating institutions will be presented in solo exhibitions during the next Photoszene Festival in May of the following year.
Participants of the Programme:
Archives are a contested place because interpretive sovereignties have manifested themselves here that are now being challenged.
Lucia Halder, Historical Photo Archive of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne
... luckily there are also archives that are the result of a desire for freedom, transparency and democracy. When the file is open to free interpretation, it is as if we invest our intelligence in a new cave of Ali Baba. My artistic projects have been dealing in a collateral way or focusing on archives and the resulting works have got successful upon the treasure I’ve been able to discover.
Joan Fontcuberta, December 2019
