SEEN BY #14 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.
"The Internet might well be the biggest reading room ever"
Reading Rooms Reading Machines, Anna-Sophie Springer, Fantasies of the Library.K Verlag 2015.
Corona forces us to rethink public spaces.
Museums and libraries are mirrors of society that try to celebrate and make education and culture accessible to everyone. How do these values also transfer to reading rooms and digital archives?
The exhibition Imprinted Matter was to take place in the format of an analog reading room. In the frame of Seen By, a cooperation between the Kunstbibliothek and the Berlin University of the Arts in the Museum für Fotografie, it was an attempt to create an intimate and open space to ask questions about representation, referencing the Kunstbibliothek and the UdK Research Project Intersectional Matter.
Though the planned Imprinted Matter reading room’s opening is postponed indefinitely, it is loading digitally.
Here you will find — in spite of closed institutions and workshops—a curated look and digital preview into the publications of UdK artists and beyond about intersectional themes that were produced for the reading room. In this age, these zines, artists books, performative, and installational publications document themselves, raise their voices, and reclaim space.
United, they are an assembly that opens in solidarity in lock-down #ClosedButOpen. This temporary, utopian reading room and printed matter library dare to prepare a safer space for learning, caring, community, and healing processes.
Even in this digital space, a safer space policy and trigger warning applies. Some of this exhibition content is based on personal and sensitive experiences and therefore intended for mature audiences. Please apply care and respect as you scroll these printed matters, identities, and backgrounds. This policy also applies to Social Media. Please, use carefully: #ImprintedMatter #Readingroomloading.
Seen By #14 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
