It is our pleasure here to announce Elisabeth Molin as the fellow for the Graz Residency for International Photographers (GRIP) 2023. This scholarship, which was initiated by the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark in collaboration with Camera Austria, was organized for the first time in 2022, with the aim of offering young artists a stay in Graz in order to use Camera Austria’s research library, work on existing and/or new projects, and get to know the local art and culture scene.

Elisabeth Molin was selected from the more than 180 artists who applied for the corresponding call announced in the spring of 2023. Starting in mid-September 2023, she will come to Graz for four weeks to continue working on her ongoing project Liquid Crystal. In it, she occupies herself with the presence of the LCD screens that have come to inhabit some of our most intimate spaces. She has thus noticed the increasing pace in LCD production in recent years, and how they have evolved, been replaced, and subsequently discarded as a result of new technologies, deregulation, and planned obsolescence.
As part of the project, she has started dismembering the screens and excavating materials from them; e.g., fresnel lenses, liquid crystal, glass, polarizers, and metal. She reorganizes and assembles the materials in different sculptural constellations and also uses them as surfaces and containers for everyday offerings, e.g., painkillers, pigments, thorns, and petals. These materials bring a sense of tactility, smell, and proximity to the industrially produced materials, and are suggestive of the rituals that the screens may or may not have been a part of. The juxtaposition of the materials examines the screen both formally and informally as a medium we see with and see through, and offers another view of the technology that we surround ourselves with daily, that has become an extension of our bodies and vision.

During the course of the residency, Elisabeth Molin will be accommodated in one of the apartments for fellows provided by the City of Graz and the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark. The Kulturvermittlung Steiermark takes over the travel costs and scholarship for the artist. Elisabeth Molin will use the library of Camera Austria to deepen her research on screens and the materiality of pictures. There will be a presentation of the work at Camera Austria at the end of the residency.

Elisabeth Molin (born 1985 in Copenhagen, DK, lives and works in Copenhagen) graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (GB), in 2009 and from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2013. Since then, she has shown her work at, among others, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE); Wiels, Brussels (BE); BB15, Linz (AT); Belmacz, London; No Show Space London; SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen (DK), at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (US); and at the Teachers College of Columbia University, New York. Her videos were shown as part of the 32nd Images Festival in Toronto (CA), the 31. Stuttgarter Filmwinter in Stuttgart (DE), and the 7th Medrar Video Festival in Cairo (EG).

In addition, we would like to also mention the summer issue of Camera Austria International, no. 162. In the Forum section in this issue, a small selection of six other projects that were also submitted for GRIP are presented. They are works by Václav Kopecký, Michaela Nagyidaiová, Somayah Elhassawy, Alexander Meyer, Lena-Lotte Agger, and Arden Surdam.