Past Present Future – 25 Years of Photography

Since the invention of photography changes in technology, style and content have been the norm. For the past two decades these changes have concerned digital tools, communication strategies, authorship, and different types of automatizations in creating images. It has led to a fundamentally different world for all sorts of picture making. Contemporary artists and photographers now move freely between various digital platforms, still and moving images, exhibitions and publications. Even if everything is different, do they still relate to the same visual language as artists working with lens-based media did in the late 1990s? What are the tendencies in today’s photography and where is photography tomorrow?

We have invited experts, curators and artists within the field of photography to share their insights on the past, what tendencies they have seen and what predictions they might have for the future. Invited guests are artists Laia Abril, Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole and Lotta Antonsson, Felix Hoffmann (Artistic Director at Foto Arsenal Wien), and photographer Kent Klich.

PARTICIPANTS

Laia Abril (1986, Spain) is a research-based artist working with photography, text, video, and sound. Her work tells intimate stories that reveals uneasy and hidden realities focusing on biopolitics and gender equality. One of her long-term projects A History of Misogyny includes award-winning books “On Abortion” (2018) and “On Rape” (2022).

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (1988, Nigeria) works with both lens-based and non-lens-based photography through installations, performance and printmaking. At the core of her practice is an investigation of material processes that explores new ways of using established techniques. She has exhibited in Sweden and internationally and her work is represented in the
Moderna Museet collection.

Lotta Antonsson (1963, Sweden) belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the early 1990s and was inspired by postmodern art and theory. Antonsson’s work reflects her fascination with the late 1960s and 1970s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolution. Her collages can be found in the collections of Moderna Museet and Halland Art Museum.

Felix Hoffmann is an art historian, curator and the first Artistic Director of the Foto Arsenal Wien, a new center for photography and lens-based media in Austria. From 2005 to 2022, he served as the Chief Curator of the C/O Berlin Foundation. In addition to publishing numerous books, he has curated exhibitions such as “Nan Goldin” (2009), “Robert Mapplethorpe” (2010), “Gordon Parks” (2016) and “The Last Image: Photography and Death” (2018).

Kent Klich (1952, Sweden) is a photographer and educator working within the fields of photography and film, using collaborative methodologies of image-making and representation. Some of his long-term projects include “The Book of Beth” (1988) and “Gaza Photoalbum” (2009), which has been exhibited at The Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg and The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen.