Marta Bogdańska was the invited AMA artist at the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum for the fourth edition of the programme.
She is a visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and cultural manager. She has a master's degree in philosophy, studied art as part of the Home Workspace Program in Beirut and then studied photography. Bogdanska has already led several international art and cultural projects and her book "Shifters" won the PHotoEspaña Award for the best international photo publication of 2022 and was nominated for the Kassel Dummy Award, the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles and the Mack First Book Award. In 2023 she was Artist in Residence at the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid and received a grant from the Culture & Animals Foundation in New York.
Footprints on the Sands of Time
Animals and their life stories are only sparsely visible in a city’s history, as in the case of the chimpanzee Petermann, who mounted a spectacular escape from Cologne Zoo in 1985. His visage, propagated in numerous photographs, has become part of the city’s visual memory, unlike the countless animals that populate the conurbation with us, day in, day out. In her project, Marta Bogdańska looks for ways of occupying a non-anthropocentric perspective in the archive and its materials as a discursive space, a space which focuses primarily on a history of humanity and, in so doing, excludes the animal as agent. By juxtaposing historical photographs with video works produced in Cologne, the project intends to sound out the coexistence between humans and “non-human animals”.
Marta Bogdańska Meets Kölnisches Stadtmuseum
AMA#4 Meets University of Cologne
Marta Bogdańska was interviewed by students of the University of Cologne in the context seminar “Artist Meets Archive – Artists in the (Photo) Archive”, led by Dr. Franziska Brons and held at the Department of Art History Cologne.
She talks about her artistic practice and her residency project, and provides insights into the creative process behind her exhibition.
More about Marta Bogdańska:
Participants
Between 2018 and 2024, 4 editions of the Artist Meets Archive programme have been realized so far. A total of 20 artists took part and presented their projects at the Photoszene Festival in Cologne.