if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography ~ National Portrait Gallery 

Canberra/ Ngunnawal Country ~ Nov 30, 2024 - June 1, 2025

‘There is so much beauty around us if only we could take the time to open our eyes and   perceive it. And then share it.’ Photographer Carol Jerrems made this tender observation in the preface to her landmark 1974 publication, A book about Australian women, produced in collaboration with writer Virginia Fraser.

Taking its title from this text, if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography considers how this impulse to observe, to record and to share continues to propel photographic practice in Australia today. This show, staged alongside the major exhibition Carol Jerrems: Portraits, spotlights the work of three contemporary Australian artists whose work sits in dialogue with Jerrems’ legacy.

Ying Ang, Katrin Koenning and Anu Kumar are photographers who capture and distil quiet moments. Like Jerrems, they chronicle intimate relationships and use the camera to mediate closely felt and emotionally vivid experiences. The gestures that breathe life into a family home, the swampy dislocation of early motherhood, the interlocked networks of friends and family. In these works, tenderness, care and connection are foregrounded and the idea of portraiture is expanded.

 

Grand Palais Paris, November 2024

 Book Launch, between the skin and sea, 

Paris Photo Nov 7, 2pm, 

Booth J07, Grand Palais

 

between the skin and sea, Chose Commune, pre-order here

 Polycopies grant

between the skin and sea

 

 

 Diffraction, Syrup Contemporary

 Sydney, July 13 - August 3, 2024

 the kids are in trouble as part of 

in a restless world like this is, 

Bundoora Homestead, 

July - September 2024

 

 Magnolia from between the skin and sea,

 CCP Silent Auction 2024

 

 Finalist, National Portrait Prize 2024

 

In May 2023, Papa caught a plane to see me in Naarm/Melbourne for one day and one night. We looked at art, walked a little,ate,took trams and sat by the river. It was the first time he had come to visit on his own since losing Sharon, his partner of 23 years.

 Shortlisted artist, Foam Paul Huf Award 2024

 

Katrin Koenning
UNTITLED, 2000–2005 (LIGHT OF DAY BOOKS NO. 10. 2023)

2023, English ~ Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21cm, Edition of 50 ~ Published by Light of Day Books / Melbourne

 

A collection of images I made on film, between 1999-2005,     across Australia, Taiwan and Germany. In the photographs are: friends, animals, oceans, one Baxter Immigration Detention Centre protest image, one anti-Woolworths protest image, one lover, one river, one photographic experiment, some trees, and plants.

 

 

   Four Lakes in Neither Magazine ~ published by Loose Joints 

  ~ Founders / Editors Sunil Shah & Bharat Sikka 

 

 NO GRAND NARRATIVE 

Emerging out of the recent pandemic, Neither is interested in creating a space for new and experimental photographic practices emerging out of South Asia and from the diaspora. However, our ultimate aim is to avoid labels based on region, nation or identity, and so this publication is neither this, nor that. It offers no grand narrative and instead foregrounds the photographic. It welcomes creative production from everywhere and reflects life as its producers and contributors experience it. What is common to all its constituent parts is a commitment to visual language and the way this forms our understanding of the world.

 

 

In this first issue of Neither, you will find fifteen artists working with the medium: Millo Ankha, Olgaç Bozalp, Philippe Calia, Tenzing Dakpa, Kapil Das, Charlie Engman, Devashish Gaur, Abhishek Khedekar, Katrin Koenning, Anu Kumar, Sathish Kumar, Akshay Mahajan, Kaamna Patel, Miraj Patel and Lorenzo Vitturi. Written contributions are from Muna Gurung, Raghav Pasricha, Sunil Shah and Alisha Clytus Sett. Neither is the creation of Bharat Sikka, edited by Sunil Shah and has been designed by Loose Joints Studio.

 

  the kids are in trouble ~ Future Tense: Living the future now

   Format Festival, Quad Derby UK, 03 - 06 2024

 the kids are in trouble ~ Der Greif

 Photography: Real and Imagined, 

National Gallery of Victoria (publisher)

 Double Take: Photographs from the Artbank Collection

March - April 2024, Artbank Melbourne

 Bodriggy’s OK Bootleg Biennale, Charlton, Vic

 February - March 2024

New Photographic Image

Society of modern Photography and Video

Daegu South Korea, December 2023

 Urth Magazine

 interview by Sarah Pannell

 I’ve admired Katrin’s beautifully disarming work for many years now, since coming across her earlier work back in 2010 when I was starting my photography studies. She has a brilliant and uncompromising vision and is someone I could happily talk to for hours, discussing not just art and photography, but all issues we face socially, politically and otherwise. Katrin’s visual language is adorned with subtlety and poetry. Both transient and contrived, with a meticulous attention to colour, texture and tone throughout her colour, and black and white works.

 

 

Above all, the way Katrin can say so much about the living, breathing world around us through her extensive and varying bodies of work is something I strive for in my own work. It was a pleasure to catch up right before both of us were setting off on new trips abroad following her most recent exhibition of work as part of Melbourne Now’s Slippery Pictures showcase at the National Gallery of Victoria.

 

 

 

 Drawing Closer - Relational Encounters

 Palmtree Workshops, Santorini Greece

 British Journal of Photography - In the Studio

'Nestled in an old European-style building, on a quiet side street, Katrin Koenning’s expansive first-floor apartment acts as a retreat and workspace. As I walk to meet her on a sunny autumn morning, I wander through the suburb of Prahran, just a couple of miles south of Melbourne’s city centre. Prahran (pronounced ‘Pran’ in the local vernacular) got its name from the Indigenous Boonwurrung word for the local river, and sits a short distance from both the river and the beaches of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. Prahran occupies an important place in Australia’s photographic history as the location of the famous Prahran Technical College (now closed) which saw students like Carol Jerrems, Susan Fereday and Bill Henson walk through its doors in the 1970s and 80s.

Koenning’s apartment is her creative haven. Multiple pinboards decorated with test prints, illustrations, newspaper clippings and collages are hung around her home creating an energy of inspiration and productivity. A large photobook collection occupies an expansive and light-filled wall in one room. Another room is devoted to processing and scanning her negatives, which she still does herself – a mark of how important process and consistency is to her practice. And, in a different part of the apartment, in a glass sunroom, rows of tagged and numbered black-and-white negatives hang from the ceiling in their dozens. Yet despite all this activity, each zone in Koenning’s apartment feels ordered, vast and intentional. There is no place for any clutter or matter out of place.' Text Daniel Boetker-Smith

Photos: Meg De Young

 

 

Love is for the Photographer,  

on Arttaca by Zahra Amiruddin

 

 Milingimbi Art and Culture workshop

   

Acquisition, while the mountains had feet 

(2020-2022), National Gallery of Victoria 

+++ full suite of works acquired in 2022

   

       

(In pandemic time), through grief and chaos and the madness of it all, walking lent great comfort day and night. When the clocks had lost their hours and worlds lay away like distant planets, everyone was solacing in being held this way; roads and paths carried all our drifting bodies. By 2021, my feet had carried me eight times around the globe already, tailing the haze that had befallen everything. Seasons had long assumed events; coming apart and re-assembling in novel ways, a kind of measure by which to navigate the trembling present. There were five kilometres where we belonged, between the river and the sea. Love was in a closer way; it was a time of endings and beginnings, loss and change. I saw ants carry their dead, foxes cross the road at midnight. I saw trees grow, birds cloak together on branches in the cold. I saw everything touched by everything else. Farther, snow came and went at least one hundred times. It helped to seek to be as liquid as one could – to conjure and collapse and yield in one perpetual commotion. To flow without our bodies to the sun; unresidential, and mutual to everything. No one knew how many years would pass this way. Were we awake or dreaming?

Using fragments and slippages to suggest narrative spaces, communities and lived experiences that are allied, fluid and multiplicit, mountains invites migrant pieces from four different bodies of work (all made since 2020) into a dialogical ontology. The wall holds their fellowship. The gathering of works creates extended imaginaries with my immediate communities, all the while positing the neighbourhood as an inner-city mini-ecology in which non-humans and humans are in near muster (together rather than apart). The hyper-local is the centre stage; on it tales of entanglement, relation, connection and intimacy unfold. Here loves, neighbours, animals, streets and parks of my suburb are the main protagonists, reminding that the close is revelatory and never fully known. Leaning against the shadows, mountains is a conversation of kinship, grief, repair and shelter.

Installation View (detail) of while the mountains had feet (2020-2022) as part of Melbourne Now / Slippery Images, curated by Maggie Finch National Gallery of Victoria,       +++      March 24 - August 20, 2023

 

In conversation, Slippery Images, 

National Gallery of Victoria    ~~~  

Curator     Maggie Finch ~~    with 

artists              Kirsten Lyttle, Rudi 

Williams         and Katrin Koenning

            Commission, VOGUE.COM, 

          Global Women 2023: Modern Traditions

    Milingimbi Art & Culture

      Women Weavers

 

"...The Bamugora, it is said, protects and acts as a repellent to  snakes, ants and dangerous animals; they instinctively stay away. It’s so incredibly beautiful seeing it unfolded, with its fringe spread out, like the sun, moving as if alive. It’s not hard to see why gallerists want to rush to display such a thing, but here, wrapped around Susan, Valda, and Roselyn Gamalaŋga, her daughters, and Charlene Madikaniwuy, her granddaughter and Valda’s daughter—three generations of women—it is alive with its true intended meaning and purpose. Susan spoke of weaving being “forever.” I asked her what “forever” meant, and she said: “Forever means all the kids can learn. The future comes from a long time ago passed to a new generation. The past becomes our future. Me, I am talking for generations. All the kids, all the men, all the women—they can learn their culture.” - Megha Kapoor

Palmtree Photoworkshops

Santorini Greece + 2023

                                                                                   

                                  + DRAWING CLOSER – RELATIONAL ENCOUNTERS +

This five -day intensive workshop on the beautiful Island of Santorini will focus on creating a space for photographic thinking and exploration of our physical and emotional connection to the everyday and to that which is close to us, surrounding us locally and in proximity. We will think about the camera as a drawing-closer and as a tool for making relation; the personal as political and the hyper-local (one’s backyard) as a stage on which narrative can unfold and be fostered.

We will examine how a method of return (to a person, a community, a place, the self) can be a way of practicing this drawing closer, and of making kin. Katrin will provide in-depth insight into her own working processes and influences, and the workshop will centre a variety of approaches and challenges to working in a relational way. She will encourage and guide participant immersion with the island to find new ideas and make new pictures that are near and ‘resident’. These new beginnings may be collaborative, experiential and experimental.

Drawing on notions of photographic practice as a ‘being-in the-world’ and as something intimately connected with who we are, participants will be invited to understand the workshop as a deep and honest meeting point for rigorous exchange, and collective and individual discussion of their own work. Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop projects-in-progress, previous ‘finished’ work, books and book dummies, personal questions or ideas for a future photographic work. Always asking what is at stake, we will study participant’s motivations and working processes, untangling how their work can engage with the realities that confront them and speak to their lived experiences.

>Angkor Photo Festival Workshops 2023, Siem Reap Cambodia<

                              

Of Embers, ArtSpace 

Realm, Nov 2022 - Feb 2023

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 are still smoking in the mind. Intensified by climate change, these ‘megafires’ left behind the largest burnt expanse witnessed on earth in the modern record.

Fire itself is pure paradox: essential for survival and yet capable of destroying life. Of Embers brings together the work of artists who have responded to this episode and the history and cultural status of fire in Australia.

James Tylor (Kaurna People, South Australia) and Rebecca Selleck’s Fire Country speaks to fact that fire has always been here, folded into Aboriginal knowledge and experience over millennia, existing within a totality of deep ecological and cultural time. Here fire is reconfigured from threat to natural ally in Indigenous cultural practice. Katrin Koenning’s photographs visualise an earthen poetics that rests in the polarity between ash and snow on Lake Mountain. For over a decade Koenning has watched and listened to the bush as it struggles to regenerate after the devastation of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Tom Goldner & Angus Scott’s photographs and video for Do Brumbies Dream in Red connect the paradoxical status of both brumby and fire in the Australian landscape and imagination. Isabella Capezio’s videos, photographs, found objects and ceramics for Feeling Loss address the perceptual slippage between the recorded image, the news media and the actual multi-sensorial experience of bushfires. 

There are no images of the raging inferno in this exhibition. These artists portray the aftermath of fire and the consequences for landscapes and sensitive ecologies knocked off balance by human impact, now in recovery. Of Embers is a creative call for awareness that addressing this balance rests with us.

 Melbourne Now Artist, 

National Gallery of Victoria, 

March 2023

 

       st      udi  o sept em ber    twen  tytwe nty              two

 Acquisition, untitled (shelter) from between the river and the sea 2021, 

 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, HOTA Gold Coast

 + Centre for Contemporary Photography Fundraiser +  

 Bleak House, VOID Publishing, 

 

 

 

curated by Brad Feuerhelm

a Conversation with Alice Zoo, Interloper

 Nearest Truth Photobook Workshop 

~ Artist Lecture, September 2022 ~

Finalist, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2022

                                                    in the studio, july twentytwentytwo