Since November 2013 the Staatliche Museen's Kunstbibliothek and Berlin's Universität der Künste join forces for a new collaborative project at the Museum für Fotografie. Jointly conceptualized, the exhibition series Seen By invites guest curators to present their individual perspective on works by students at the Berlin University of the Arts. In the Museum für Fotografie which the Kunstbibliothek oversees, the students are given a new platform on which to showcase their works.

In our algorithmically refreshed 'user-friendly’ universe, past reboots into present, representations resist resolution, images circulate into surfaces and almost no place seems to be left for surprises. Can images continue to appear as polysemous vernacular, speculative in meaning? Where to look for fresh and versatile articulation modalities through images, if there are any?

In a famous television interview, Hannah Arendt says "I must understand, that is why I continue to write”. Place an Image / Place in Image, the third seminar exhibition of Seen By series invites Musquiqui Chihying, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Cornelia Herfurtner, Daniel Reuter, Dierk Saathoff, Kristof Trakal, Milos Trakilovic and Till Wittwer to debate the place of developing artistic subjectivities in image production framed by a chain reaction-built environment of emotion, apparatus, reality, and speculation through their varied practice. Abstracting image as site and gesture of criticality, the exhibition highlights the agency of topographic imagination as an affective research tool that recurs in the process of different works.

Exhibition Series Seen By

Seen By #3 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