KATE STRAIN

Between the Farmer and the Dung Beetle

The work of the Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony speaks with urgency to the present moment. Breaking new artistic ground in order to mobilize important conversations about climate change, food production, and biodiversity, O’Mahony’s generative research and meaningful collaborations demonstrate a deep understanding of the importance of land and landscape in Ireland. Producing art in response to Irish community culture, its strengths and difficulties, her practice is ambitious in reach, yet always mindful to return full circle to its source of inspiration and the context in which it was made. Her work’s integrity, quality, and collaborative approach amplifies under sung voices, while channeling the potential of art to create the conditions that make real connection, conversation, and thought possible.

Born in Limerick in 1956, O’Mahony studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, returning to Ireland after seventeen years in 1991. Effectively restarting her artistic career in the Burren landscape of County Clare, O’Mahony’s move coincided with a decade-­long conflict about the construction of an interpretive center in the Burren National Park. Her painting series Erratics (1996) explored this evolving politics of landscape and belonging, reflecting on rural urban migration through the metaphor of erratic boulders displaced through glaciation. Between 2000 and 2010, O’Mahony’s practice evolved to reflect on the impact of agriculture on rural communities, resulting in two significant, site-specific public artworks: Cross Land (2006) was a temporary land intervention in the Burren that examined the unintended effects of environmental and planning regulations, as well as new farming practices, on the landscape. Raising questions of effective community engagement in the Burren, Cross Land prompted the artist to reopen a decommissioned post office in nearby Killinaboy, resulting in her next public art project X-PO (2007–ongoing).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 171/2025, pp. 9–18.

NACE ZAVRL

We Build the Future, the Future Builds Us

In December 1951, after five years of production, socialist Slovenia’s newsreel studio shut down. Over just as many years, fifty-four films were made and distributed, their length between ten and twenty minutes. Theaters and town halls were common screening venues, with fiction features preceded by an informational short. To say that these communiqués celebrated solidarity, techno-industrial progress, and an assortment of communist triumphs would be to state the obvious; with titles such as Ljubljana Greets Its Liberators (Ljubljana pozdravlja osvoboditelje, no. 1), Our Physical Culture (Naša fiskultura, no. 19), and Mechanization in Forestry (Mehanizacija v gozdarstvu, no. 38), the films’ political commitments were conspicuous and explicit. The reasons why the country’s newsreel department ceased operations are still obscure. What remained was an archive of fifty-four films and a historical void.

Against all odds, however, the newsreel is back, more adventurous and dynamized than ever. In 2013, the artist Nika Autor reanimated the country’s news-making tradition from its sixty-two-year slumber. The title of Autor’s inaugural exploit is important and evocative: Obzornik 55, or Newsreel 55, a number that gestures to the fifty-four-film lineage. Taking off where the initial socialist series had ended, Autor’s thirty-one-minute video announces itself as an explicit, self-aware resumption of the earlier state-sponsored activity, even though the two filmmaking contexts lie worlds—and a regime change—apart. Recorded in 2012 amidst the turmoil of Slovenia’s anti-austerity demonstrations, number fifty-five is the product of an ultra-low-expense, guerrilla mode of making, a far cry from the economic comfort and dependable state support that newsreels up to fifty-four enjoyed. With sounds and poor images recorded on inexpensive consumer electronics, Autor’s newsreels take their aesthetic cue not from official documentary films, but rather from the emancipatory histories of the militant Third Cinema.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 171/2025, pp. 19–28.

HERWIG G. HÖLLER

Overcoming the Soviet Union with the Violin

Three nude men stand at the edge of a body of water, covering their genitals with their hands and staring expressively and grimly upwards. A bare-chested man with closed eyes and a dreamy expression stands in a meadow holding a violin, while another image again shows a bare-chested man holding a violin standing in a meadow, this time with several cows grazing in the background.

Evgeniy Pavlov from Kharkiv, then twenty-two years old, sent ten black-and-white photographs from his series The Violin (1972) to the editorial office of the renowned Polish magazine Fotografia—three of which subsequently appeared in the January 1973 issue under the rubric “Evaluation of submitted images.” The artist declares that the basis of the series “lies in the evolution of human thoughts and feelings, which have been taken as they are and translated into the language of photographic images,” as the renowned historian of photography Jan Sunderland noted in his accompanying text. Sunderland saw parallels between Pavlov’s work and that of artists active at the turn of the century, such as the Polish Art Nouveau painter Edward Okuń and the Russian Symbolist Mikhail Vrubel. “This entire series is a kind of fairy tale in which different, not necessarily realistic laws may apply,” he wrote.

In retrospect, this publication comes across as a subtle anti-Soviet gesture. Socialist Poland was certainly much more liberal than the Soviet Union, where a comparable publication would have been virtually inconceivable. At that time, however, Fotografia stood under intense pressure: after the monthly journal published a historical photograph in March 1972 depicting Józef Piłsudski, the Chief of State who had successfully defeated the Red Army after World War I, the Soviet embassy intervened and brought about the dismis­sal of the editorial staff. The distinguished eighty-one-year-old Sunderland, however, clearly received permission to continue in his column. While the new editorial team devoted considerable space of the first issue of 1973 to discussing a semi-official photography exhi­bition marking the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union, and proclaimed a new policy against “subjective photography” in a programmatic essay, the photo historian ignored these guidelines and published the work of the young photographer from Kharkiv in the same issue. He thus brought about the very first publication on the movement that became known much later as the “Kharkiv School of Photography.”

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 171/2025, pp. 29–38.

ANYA HARRISON

Glimpses of You, Déjà Vu

In their 1979 study on Victorian literary fiction, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, the feminist critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar interpret female madness as a direct representation of the stifling of female voices and agency. The archetype of the madwoman in the attic (albeit her terrain extends far beyond this one space) becomes the sine qua non that reflects the inherent tensions between societal constraints and embodied rebellion against the near-invisible shackles of proper decorum and servility. Madness, folly, schizophre­nia, you name it: but whatever it entails, it does so with a voice that always and forever splinters into an ebbing flow of multitudes.

“Multitudes” could be an apt term to describe Anaïs Horn’s practice, a fragile, tender web of spectral presences, hauntings, and a chosen family of voices past and present that are woven into multi­media installations—comprising image, sound, and text, to name a few—responsive and responding to intimate, domestic, closed-off spaces. If most of the voices reverberating throughout Horn’s work—which she actively seeks out—are female, then it is because she is attuned to the consistency with which certain experiences are passed on across generations. She shares with these figures a propensity to disregard clear-cut distinctions between fantasy and reality. For her, those liminal states, those mental states so specific to a female coming-of-age, ultimately linger on across time, barely perceptible but irrevocably there, infusing the spaces they inhabit.

For Longing Ghosts in Deep Blue Paranoia (2022), a work complex that has been presented in various exhibition contexts, and its accompanying publication (Drama Books, Paris, 2022), Anaïs Horn conjured a multilayered narrative populated by phantoms real, imagined, and somewhere in-between. Dedicated to Charlotte of Belgi­um (1840–1927), an exceptionally ambitious and intellectually dri­ven princess, the project takes as both its subject and starting point Miramare Castle, the ostentatious abode on the outskirts of Trieste in Italy, built by her husband, Maximilian of Austria (1832–1867).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 171/2025, pp. 39–48.

SABINE MARIA SCHMIDT

“I Just Don’t Want to Become a Capitalist”—On the Sublime in the Darkness of the Archive

Within just a decade, Julia Lübbecke has developed a rich repertoire of strategies for staging pictures and texts that are actually concealed, and that she selects and safeguards. They are quiet pictures of quiet revolts, whose continuities persist in (the political events of) contemporary life.

For this, she occupies herself with found photographs, pictures, and texts, as well as with materials connected to archiving. Her spatial installations turn everything on its head, which corresponds to common criteria, categories, and attributions of archival praxis, and thus provoke not only possible visual and intellectual, but also multisensory and psychological approaches.

In recent years, work in archives and on them has become a fixed parameter of photographic-artistic practice—from the perspective of both artists and curators.¹ In her research on different thematic blocks, three archives were of particular significance for Julia Lübbecke: the feminist archive FFBIZ in Berlin, the archive for social movements (AfsB) in Bochum, and the queer*feminist archive LIESELLE at Ruhr University Bochum. It is from these archives that the topics that Lübbecke has been working on over longer periods of time arose: a historical reappraisal of feminisms, gender, industrial action, and equal rights.

Archival material is fragile. It indeed seems as if photographic archival materials, even when stored in an ideal manner, have only a limited chance of survival. Pigments bleed or become darker; paper fades, even if not exposed to light. In the case of analogue photographs, the process of decay is accelerated in particular by various toxic substances from chemical development processes. . . .

Countless digitization projects have characterized the first decades of the twenty-first century—in such a scope that, in view of all the energy and storage capacities required, it has given rise to an Industrialization 4.0. Are historical photographic pictures, like all organic bodies, therefore not ultimately destined to perish in the end? In order to make them readable in the first place, Julia Lübbecke gives the materials found in archives a new state of being.

¹ The series “Artist Meets Archive” of the festival Internationale Photoszene Köln, for example, can be mentioned here exemplarily, https://www.photoszene.de/de/festival/ausstellungen-2025, or the archive stipendium “Artists on Photography” of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, https://www.muenchner-stadtmuseum.de/sammlungen/sammlungsaufrufe/artists-on-photography.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 171/2025, pp. 49–58.