INTIMACY AND FRAGMENTS IN KATRIN KOENNING'S 'MIRRORS' ~ REVIEW, M-ARTLENS
On a spring afternoon in Doncaster, the Manningham Art Gallery hums with a quiet kind of attention. Housed within MC Square—a civic building more often associated with community services than contemporary art—the gallery doesn’t announce itself with grandeur. Its white walls and modest scale stand in deliberate contrast to the blockbuster venues of central Melbourne. And yet, stepping inside, one feels something expansive. Katrin Koenning’s Mirrors, which runs here until 18 October, gathers fragments from more than two decades of the artist’s archive into constellations that shimmer with intimacy, loss, and belonging.
The gallery’s own description of the show as “a powerful new exhibition…bringing everyday moments into focus” functions as a neat headline, but the exhibition itself goes further. What Koenning offers is not simply the elevation of the ordinary, but a quiet reimagining of how photographs live in relation to one another. Mirrors is not a retrospective; it does not attempt to tell the story of a career in neat sequence. Instead, the works form constellations: arrangements of small-scale prints that ask to be encountered relationally. Faces, landscapes, domestic gestures, and nonhuman presences hang together in clusters or loose grids — a form of constellational hanging, where meaning emerges in the interplay between images rather than from any single work. There are no explanatory captions to impose narrative. Instead, Koenning trusts her audience to discover connections, to pause in the silences between works, to let the fragments breathe.
Koenning herself articulates this ethos succinctly: “The picture is such a tiny part – the value lies in the act of relating and how these relations live in the world.” It is a statement that could serve as a manifesto for her entire practice. For more than twenty years, she has pursued photography not as proof or spectacle, but as relation: between people, within communities, and across the more-than-human world.
Fragments and Relations
Born in Dortmund in 1978, Koenning moved to Australia in 2003 and has since established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography. Her earlier series — The Crossing, Indefinitely, and others — each wrestled with questions of distance, kinship, and ecological entanglement. What unites them is an insistence on intimacy as both subject and method.
Mirrors distils those concerns into something quieter, yet no less resonant. By turning to her own archive, Koenning transforms the act of curation into a poetic gesture. The archive here is not treated as a storage cabinet of proofs, but as living tissue: porous, mutable, open to new relations. Photographs of people sit alongside images of animals, foliage, and weather, none given precedence. A portrait of a young woman finds echo in the curve of a tree branch; a window draped in fabric resonates with a coastal horizon.
One work, yanakie (one) (2021), anchors the exhibition’s tone. Modest in scale at 40 × 30 cm, it depicts a domestic window fogged with condensation, a curtain drifting slightly in muted light. On first glance, it is unremarkable — an image one might pass by. But the more one lingers, the more its fragility takes hold. It is the kind of photograph that insists intimacy resides not in spectacle but in the quiet persistence of the everyday. Another, Seaside Jiggle (2022), offers a shimmer of water, the edge of coastline blurred into abstraction. Together, these prints establish a register of modesty, refusing the monumental in favour of resonance.
The installation reflects this sensibility. Rather than lining works evenly in rows, Koenning arranges them into constellations. A trio of black-and-white portraits leans toward a single colour abstraction; across the room, a figure echoes the shape of a tree line. The walls become fields of relation, where meaning is not contained within individual images but emerges across them. This method places her in dialogue with Wolfgang Tillmans, whose constellational strategies collapse hierarchies between subjects. Yet Koenning’s approach is distinct: where Tillmans often revels in visual excess, Koenning leans toward quietude. Her constellations do not dazzle; they whisper.
This whispering tone aligns her more closely with Sophie Calle, who has long mined fragments of everyday life — letters, photographs, diary entries — to meditate on intimacy, loss, and absence. Like Calle, Koenning is less concerned with spectacle than with fragile registers of relation. And yet, her photographs remain resolutely her own: steeped in the textures of Australian light, shaped by the long arc of migration, and attuned to the ecological entanglements of her adopted home.
Belonging in the Everyday
What emerges most strongly in Mirrors is a vision of belonging that is fragile, provisional, and ecological. Koenning’s refusal to separate human from nonhuman is evident throughout: portraits sit comfortably beside images of trees, weather, and animals. Belonging here is not fixed identity but ongoing relation, a recognition that we live enmeshed with others — both human and more-than-human.
This ethos situates her alongside Australian contemporaries such as Hoda Afshar, Atong Atem, and Polly Borland. Koenning shares with them a commitment to photography as ethical encounter, but her register remains distinct: modest, porous, attentive to the fragile resonance of the ordinary.
Her international profile is substantial. She has exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, Chobi Mela in Bangladesh, and Paris Photo. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Zeit Magazin, Vogue.com, and Der Spiegel. Yet Mirrors is not an exhibition that consolidates reputation. It does not celebrate achievement so much as return to vulnerability: the condensation on glass, the shimmer of water, the fragments that hold us.
What lingers most is the exhibition’s radical modesty. In an age of spectacle — where images are designed to be scrolled, consumed, and forgotten — Koenning wagers that intimacy still matters. She asks her viewers to slow down, to attend, to let meaning emerge in the gaps between works. In doing so, she reminds us that photography’s power lies not in grand statements but in fragile encounters: condensation on glass, the shimmer of water, a shadow across a face.
As you step out of Manningham Art Gallery into the suburban air, the photographs remain — not as definitive images, but as traces. They hover, provisional and resonant, like light caught on a curtain or breath on a windowpane. Mirrors offers no conclusion. It offers something rarer: the possibility of relation, the fragile weave of belonging in the everyday.
