Research Meets Artist

Photographic archives are places of collecting and storage, but they also function as material repositories of photographic images and, with that, also become places of rendering either visible or invisible. The positions taken by this year’s Artist Meets Archive artists are devoted, in a whole variety of approaches, to the reflexive visibilities of the archived photographic image: to gazes of power, to female perspectives on colonial contexts, to artificial seeing done by digital image recognition processes, and to the gaze which is fixed in the collective visual memory – the tourist gaze. What happens at the interface of the archival when it meets with an artistic perspective, and how does archived material open itself to reflection from an artistic viewpoint?

On 13 May 2023, as part of Artist Meets Archive #3, a dialogue symposium titled Research Meets Artist took place, during which the Artist Meets Archive artists met with scientific positions in four open dialogues.

With an introductory lecture by Dr. Franziska Brons (University of Cologne).

Dr. Roland Meyer (Ruhr-University Bochum) Meets Lilly Lulay
Dr. Friederike Wappler (Ruhr-University Bochum) Meets Pablo Lerma
Marc Feustel (Author/Curator, Paris) Meets Naoya Hatakeyama
Sophie-Charlotte Opitz (Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden) Meets Lebohang Kganye

The dialogues will each begin with a brief keynote and, in the ensuing conversation, reflect on the artists’ artistic work.

Moderated by Lucia Halder and Miriam Zlobinski (DGPh History and Archives department).

The symposium is taking place in partnership with DGPh/Sektion Geschichte und Archive and the Rheinisches Bildarchiv as part of the programme Artist Meets Archive #3 of Internationale Photoszene Köln. It is sponsored by the City of Cologne, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Kunststiftung NRW.