Take A Seat

Take A Seat: Already seen – Questioning white gazes

📆Thursday, May 22, 2025

🕢7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

📍PhotoPavillon, Hahnenstr. 8, 50667 Cologne

Free admission

Caroline Brünen, Anne Nwanneka, and Jens Scholz will gather at the table. Based on their contributions to the Photoszene Festival 2025, the discussion will focus on the white gaze. The photographers are confronted with the white gaze in various ways, as it is a formative force in photography.

How could white gazes that have “already been seen” lose their role through one's own photographic attitude?

What conditions and decisions can be created participatively in the photographs?

What will happen to historical and contemporary interpretive authority in the future?

Moderated by: Lucia Halder (Rautenstrauch-Joost-Museum and Int. Photoszene Festival Cologne)

G. Kühnhardt Alvarez invites you to take a seat at the table. Photographers, curators, cultural professionals, and anyone who is interested in this topic are warmly invited to attend.

About the guests:

Caroline Brünen studied Latin American Studies and Artistic Photography in Cologne and Mexico City. In her work, she deals with social and ecological (in)justice and the question of how power structures shape our world; her projects tell the stories of those whose perspectives are often overlooked in prevailing narratives. To this end, she combines photography with text, audio, and video. Exhibitions include the Goethe-Institut Paris and the Kunsthafen Cologne.

Anne Nwanneka's work “Leaving Lagos” was created during a trip to Nigeria in 2022, shortly after the end of an intercultural marriage. Between personal upheaval, loss, and new beginnings, Nwanneka captures moments of farewell, observation, and rediscovery in her photographic work. The city of Lagos becomes the protagonist in all its contradictions, liveliness, and unpredictability.

Jens Scholz is exhibiting the work of German-Argentinian photographer Annemarie Heinrich (1912–2005), 73 years after her photographs were presented at Photokina Cologne. Jens Scholz Auctions is showing a selection from the oeuvre of what is probably the most sought-after celebrity photographer in Buenos Aires (1925–1987).

Lucia Halder has been curator and consultant for the photographic collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum since 2015 and chair of the History & Archives section of the DGPh. Her work focuses on the history, semantics, and significance of historical and contemporary photographs in terms of memory politics. Her work focuses on exploring decolonial spaces of action in photographic archives and collections.