The starting point for Seen By #8 was the continual production and wide dissemination of digital images, which give the impression of circulating between platforms, gadgets and screens without any boundaries or limitations – yet are nevertheless subject to material conditions. Conditions which have implications for their production and dissemination and which range from state and media guidelines to feedback loops between images and their subjects/objects.

Questions such as how the visible relates to the invisible, how connections can be made between exhibition space and the ubiquitous world of images, and how these connections, the codes, possibilities and limitations of photography and images in the digital age, and their twin status as image and artwork, can actually be shown, formed the basis for a series of workshops, whose focus ranged from theoretical and art-historical themes to practical questions about the feasibility of realising individual projects.

The subject matter and area of enquiry outlined here are given material form in the exhibition through works which relate to the two-way crossover of images from the areas of mass media and culture and their knowledge systems and effects, or which exemplify the materiality of the dispositif character of photography, or which understand image-objects as membranes that modulate the differences between the private and public or the visible and the sayable.

The exhibition includes contributions by Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg, You Gu, Miji Ih, Anna Lauenstein, Johanna Michel and Lisa Woite and collaborating artists Mizu Sugai + Jonathan Jung, and is staged in collaboration with Hannes Loichinger.

Exhibition Series Seen By

Seen By #8 is part of the exhibition series Seen By, a joint project presented at the Museum für Fotografie and organized by the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Its aim is to rethink curatorial and artistic strategies for working with contemporary photography. More information: www.smb.museum/seenby