172 | 2025

STEFFEN SIEGEL

Into the Eye: Johannes Raimann's Metapictures of Photography

Photographic processes are determined by relationships of presence and absence. With a view to what results from them, in other words, photographic pictures, such relationships have frequently been discussed from the perspective of theory. What is decisive in them is a temporal tension, which we revive each time we view a photograph: Though our gaze encounters visual information filled with presence, it denotes nothing more than a past becoming increasingly distant. That this may give rise to a peculiar mental confusion is described in depth by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980). In his book, the historical portrait of a murderer who was already sentenced to death in 1865 becomes the theoretical thought-image: “He is dead and he is going to die.”¹

However, the experience of absence does not only play a fundamental role in the reception of photographs. Such absences are at least equally decisive in the moment that photographic pictures are produced. But is it even possible to say when exactly this occurs, hence, at what point the creation of a photograph actually takes place?

1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 172/2025, pp. 9–20.

LƯU BÍCH NGỌC &
HẢI NAM NGUYỄN

On the Little Things in Life That Separate Us

How can a robot vacuum cleaner or a quadcopter drone camera be understood as products of war and destruction? With this deceptively simple question, Maithu Bùi’s works open up a field of interconnections and complexities in our world, where everyday objects that are meant to make life easier reveal their hidden genealogies within systems of violence and technological militarization.

In 2024, when crossing through the exhibition space of Galerie im Turm in Berlin, viewers were immediately drawn to the black shadows of birds and drones swarming across the windows and walls. Inside Maithu Bùi’s first solo exhibition, a voiceover from the video work fromBattlefields toRoborders (2024) began to play:
“My voice’s name is Reveal and on behalf of Storyline, it is my plea- sure to welcome you aboard with service from Battlefields to Roborders. We are in line for take-off and are expected to be in the air in approximately ten minutes time. Thank you for choosing this Storyline. Enjoy your journey.”

Inspired by The Walls Have Eyes (2024) by Petra Molnar, a har- rowing investigation into global “smart borders” and the dehumanizing power of unregulated AI, the work comprises a two-channel animated video, research posters, and a large-scale installation.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 172/2025, pp. 21–32.

NADINE ISABELLE HENRICH

Nothing Stable Under Heaven

The photographic objects of Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah move and shift space and time. The pictorial process carries out an attempt to cause things that have been suppressed to well up in order to repair them. Cracks and scratches, like wounds, are placed as an opaque layer over the picture plane, and become connected to the people and landscapes appearing beneath it. Adu-Sanyah regards her works as “relational fields” that exist in an ongoing process as well as in connection to one another. The interrelated handprinted works from RESIDUAL SKY (2024–ongoing) reproduced here invite viewers into the layers of the experimental, time-based, and iterative processes of her practice. In the genuine materiality, which makes suppressed, unseen, and painful things subside or rise up again later in an altered form, emotions, memories, relationships, and stories are reshaped and transformed.

The works are characterized by a peculiar colorfulness, which, often as a result of strong portions of magenta, transports a deeply physical and psychological frequency. The intense shades of red, orange, and violet, augmented by affect, pain, anger, and loss, show zones of transitions, development, and analogue picture-creation. Landscape motifs well up from a powerful, at times unbearable red and, in Adu-Sanyah’s work, develop a smoldering charging and latent autonomy. A red edge leaks into an orange forecourt, proliferating in a pale thicket, as if pervaded by veins.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 172/2025, pp. 33–44.

FRANCESCA LAZZARINI

The Generative Space of Being With

FL Hi Klara and Thobias, so glad to share this collaborative writing process with you! It takes shape while we are preparing The Space Between, an exhibition that coalesces from a long-lasting entanglement between your artistic practice and my curatorial research, now further enhanced by Camera Austria’s welcoming hospitality. As the title hints, the show is meant to summon a space of betweenness, where the encounter of different elements—images, texts, people, media, AI, and ideas—allows for the emergence of knowledge through relationality. And from here I would like to start. (. . .)

KK & TF Thank you, Francesca. We also share your sense of the dynamics you describe so eloquently. Indeed, we ask ourselves: where do we find ourselves when we feel the imperative to unsettle what seems bound up in ideology, and where might that gesture lead us? Perhaps it is this sense of fraudulent causality that continually draws us back to the question of whether it is, in fact, possible to think that things could be “otherwise.”

If we begin with language, then we can think of this as concerning something other than what follows a syntactic or grammatical rule.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 172/2025, pp. 45–56.