between the skin and sea 

review, PH Museum  

 

 

 Out of the Frame: Conversations 

about Photography Podcast with Pia Johnson

 between the skin and sea review 

by Milena Ill, Fisheye Magazine

'...Fauna, flora, and human beings all share a dull pain here. Faces are absent from view, absorbed—with a few exceptions, such as the final image, that of a child perched on adult shoulders, half-turned toward us, seeming to defy the viewer—as if ironically reminding us that everything escapes us. The photographs, initially in black and white, taken in various locations across Australia, traverse fragments of ordinary existence—a cat, a house, many children—without ever descending into the chronicle. Each scene seems imbued with a silent disturbance, a diffuse sadness; the use of black and white establishes a suspended, almost spectral time. So much so that nature itself seems to become a mourning character: a cat gazing sadly out the window, damaged forests, ants – mentioned in the text – carrying their dead… Everything in Between the Skin and Sea suggests a loss shared between humans and non-humans.

“I think that in our time of ecological emergency, it’s impossible not to feel this way, unless you think of yourself as separate from or superior to the natural world,” she says (...) Never far from the scenes we contemplate, there is the sea, a profound yearning whose symbolic power permeates the work even in its title. Between the sea and the skin: between what overflows and what contains, between what carries and what keeps, between what escapes us and what we can touch. In this tension, there is photography, a fragile refuge, an attempt to be “like water,” that is, elusive, porous, alive.'

...

 

 'Between the Skin and Sea thus establishes itself as a poetics of entanglement, both fragile and profound. The author's fragmentary style is steeped in a powerful timelessness, a sober delicacy. The formats are multiple—film, digital, color, black and white. At the center of the book, a colorful interlude, announced by flowers, briefly emerges—red hair, a clay vase—before disappearing in favor of the half-light of a full moon populated by creatures and shadows. But nothing is fixed here: the photographer rejects any closure or resolution. "What I seek is to make several truths coexist in the same story, a multiplicity of life experiences," she confides. Conceived in collaboration with Chose Commune and its founder Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi, Katrin Koenning's book is a porous and moving work, which captures interdependence, intimate and universal, and invites us to listen to the shared silences of the world.'

 between the skin and sea review, 

American Suburb X 

 CONVERSATION WITH BEN SMITH, A SMALL VOICE PODCAST

 

 between the skin and sea review by 

Diane Smyth, British Journal of Photography 

 

 between the skin and sea 

review by Jörg Colberg ~ CPH Mag

...

...'between the skin and sea is filled with a dread that cannot truly be named because it’s more than what  was produced by the pandemic. It’s difficult to remember this now, but there also was a real beauty to the many manifestations of solidarity that emerged at the time (at least until we all got so tired of living under that particular Damocles sword).

The book contains frequent allusions to those as well, to the reaching out and being with each other, realizing that the physical distance we would have to observe only served to remind us of the closeness we felt with each other.

This is the kind of book that could only have been made by a mature artist, someone who has been in this world for a while to know about her own and other people’s vulnerabilities, someone who has had her fair share of suffering and disappointments, someone who knows how to pull a widely felt sentiment out of her innermost emotional core.'

 

'Instead, art has to remind us of what little shards of shared humanity we have left. Photographs ask us to see — and then to feel (or rather the good ones do; the others are still only pictures of sticks and stones that no highfalutin statement can salvage).

And this is the age where we have to force ourselves to look, to see, to feel — and then to act. For things to get better, we will have to start out at the smallest scales — a little kindness to a stranger maybe, or a smile.'

   spread, between the skin and sea, Chose Commune

 Installation view, if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography, 

National Portrait Gallery Canberra, until June 1, 2025

between the skin and sea

 Naarm book launch, Perimeter Books, Saturday Dec 7th, 3-5pm

 

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