169 | 2025

Our conceptual preparations for the present issue of Camera Austria International played out as a reaction to Austria’s election results in the fall of 2024, yet before the announcement of Germany’s early federal elections in mid-December 2024. Events seem to have been following in quick succession ever since! The coalition negotiations between the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) failed around the time this issue was being finalized. The leaked information from these negotiations gives us an inkling of how ruthlessly the FPÖ (has) pursued the goal of elementally restructuring Austria, all the while ignoring basic fundaments like rule of law and demo­cracy. In early February 2025, the German chancellor candidate Fried­­rich Merz from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) polar­ized his country and dangerously damaged the “firewall” against the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) with his planned tightening of German asylum policy, for which he relied on votes from the AfD. Donald Trump, in turn, has been stoking the fires of a denial and instrumentalization of fascist history on an almost daily basis with provocations like his desire to annex Greenland or to take over the Gaza Strip so it could become a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” alongside his rapid issuance of executive orders that hold dire consequences for American civil society and for US immigrants. Such political maneuvering endangers the countless achievements of liberal democracies, for instance laws that safeguard the rights of population groups that are marginalized or, comparatively speaking, weak and poor.

The spread and acceptance of right-wing populism, treatment of the legacy of fascism, isolation from the supposed Other, and associated retreat into the private sphere—all these topics have been shaping societies globally in recent years, especially right now in the present. The projects by Bertrand Cavalier, Leon Kahane, Sandra Vita­ljić, and Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik introduced in the March issue of Camera Austria International address—each on its own, but also collectively—these pressing themes, opening up a many-
voiced space of associations where the situatedness of the individual is discernible within precarious and challenging political constellations.

In Orit Gat’s essay on the project Concrete Doesn’t Burn (2018/
2020) by Bertrand Cavalier, the author deals with the traces that war and destruction have left behind in so many European cities, examining how these traces echo, even if they are not directly visible and tangible. Cavalier, according to Gat, is concerned with the reciprocal relationship between the individual and architecture, with the question of how people localize themselves within the architectures and spaces that the artist photographs in black and white, and with their (possible) position in the fabric of history, memory, and contemporary urbanity as inscribed in these images: “Who has ever walked in a city and not been told about ruins from a past conflict, disaster, trauma?”

Nora Sternfeld, in her contribution about the longtime work of Leon Kahane, which involves the mediums of photography, film, and installation, examines how the artist approaches images and their complex entanglements in the political past and present, and how he reflects again and again on the ideological appropriation of these pictures. Seemingly self-evident representations are challenged in the process, whereby Kahane “works with and on forms and methods by means of which this can occur. He thereby manages to counter the appearance of innocence and immediacy artistically and, by doing so, to both show something and to represent the mechanisms of representation themselves as well.”

Sandra Vitaljić, in turn, draws on her own personal experience as a migrant in Sweden as a point of departure for compiling personal reports from various fellow women migrants to the country. The artist took the related photographs, herbariums, and text-based elements and created a “collective diary” from this material. At the center of this polyphonic narrative about women’s migration experiences and the concomitant assimilation (difficulties) is the “questioning [of] the precarious position of an immigrant. Take for instance never being called for a work interview despite being overqualified or never even getting a response to an apartment ad due to a ‘foreign’-sounding name.” Ashik and Koshik Zaman, who grew up in a family that had emigrated from Bangladesh to Sweden, met Vitaljić in Stockholm to speak with her about the various reference points in her work I Just Greet Back (2019–ongoing).

The conversation between Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik and Raimar Stange, conducted specially for this issue, takes as its starting point the artist duo’s installation Bereitschaft (2024), which was devel­oped with the help of motion design and is based on numerous TikTok videos. In this piece, Ganslmeier & Zibelnik call into question how—with an utter lack of reflection—not only the right-wing scene on various social media platforms appropriates (militaristic) aesthetics rooted in National Socialism, but how Bro Culture in the mainstream also takes up and idealizes the same. The conversation moreover thematizes the earlier work Haut, Stein (2017–20) and the currently running project Fault Line (2023–ongoing), the latter dealing with climate catastrophes in various places throughout Southern Europe and the conclusions of the people living there.

The Forum in this issue was developed by Lucie Stahl together with eleven students from her class for Artistic Photography at the University of Arts Linz during the winter semester of 2024–25. It likewise picks up on the many voices that we encounter in the media daily, also in social networks. Here, the students explore questions of artistic access as an impulse for countering a sense of stagnation, and they experiment with different formal and technical means of image production.

The multifaceted media landscape—and, with it, independent and critical journalism—is increasingly being called into question in times of political and economic pressure. At this juncture, we would like to thank you once again for your interest in Camera Austria International and for your continued support. Please remain loyal to us in the future! Indeed, your support is more important than ever—not only for our organization, but also for countless other independent media, art, and cultural initiatives that make room for a discourse that does justice to the complexity of our present day.

March 2025
June Drevet, Christina Töpfer

Cover: Leon Kahane, from the series: FRONTEX, 2008. Analogue large format photograph. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Cologne / Munich.