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

 

      PERSONA: 50 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT QCA, August 2022   

Angela Blakely, Amy Carkeek, Anna Carey, Alan Hill, Bruce Reynolds,Christine Ko, David Lloyd, Dean West, Eric Bridgman,Fiona Foley, Gerwyn Davies, Jay Younger, Joachim Froese, Joe Ruckli, Katrin Koenning, Kelly Hussey-Smith, Louise May Dela Cruz, Man&Wah, Marian Drew, Martin Smith, Nicolette Johnson, Raphaela Rosella, Ray Cook, Renata Buziak, Russell Shakespeare, Shehab Udin, Swade Ferguson,Talitha Grootenboer, The Huxleys, Tracey Moffatt

Spanning all four QCA Galleries spaces, this exhibition is an exploration of half a century of photographic teaching and learning at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Persona: 50 Years of Photography at QCA explores the territory of the self, alter ego, disguise or alias.

This exhibition features the work of over twenty-five QCA alumni and students, and will feature a wide range of media. Focusing on works that have a strong personal or autobiographical element, the exhibition serves as a salutation to the past fifty years of Photography at the Queensland College of Art, and a celebration of what’s to come.Curated by Henri van Noordenburg.

 

<Return to Nature, Monash Gallery of Art, Jul-Sept 2022 >

 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize,

Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, July-August 2022

 + studio, june twentytwentytwo +

 SWELL,IMA Magazine-Spring/Summer Vol.37

 

 

 

 

Sleek Magazine / LOVE

 

'Wenn wir bereit dafür sind, greifen uns die

Fotografien von Katrin Koenning mit einer

 Wucht von Gefühlen an. Sie sagt von sich 

selbst, dass sie nicht still sein kann. 

Sie hat so recht: ihre Fotos sprechen, flüstern, 

schreien, entführen, wühlen tief und 

umfassen die ganze Palette erzählerischer 

Momente einer geschichte. Es sind 

Wahrheiten über Menschen, die Liebe 

und sie selbst. Ein Protokoll.' - Anja Prinz

 

 In Conversation with Tim Dechent / GESPRÄCHE

 Photocircle Nepal & Pathshala South Asian Media Institute ~ International Storytelling Workshop Guest Lecture

Considered Environment: In Discussion

+

Centre for Contemporary Photography 

 

 animãlis, Perth Centre for Photography, March - May 2022

Artist contribution, THIS LONG CENTURY, December 2021

 

ZEIT Magazin New Year Special Edition, Dec 2021

Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia
by Daniel Palmer and Martin Jolly, Perimeter Editions

INSTALLATION VIEW: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020) offers a significant new account of photography in Australia, told through its most important exhibitions and modes of collection and display. From colonial records to contemporary art, the book presents a chronology of rarely seen installation views from both well-known and forgotten exhibitions, along with a series of essays that tell the story of the individuals and institutions that have proved intrinsic to the public circulation of photographs. At once specific and widely contextual in its scope, this longterm research project from two of Australia’s leading academics and educators in the field enriches our understanding of the diversity of Australian photography by looking at what lies beyond the frame. Installation View speaks not only to pictures, but to the people and the places that nurture them.

 WHERE WORLDS COLLIDE by Nilofer Khan, 

Better Photography Magazine India

 the kids are in trouble in Maps of Disquiet,

Chennai Photo Biennale, Dec 2021 - Feb 2022

 

  Curatorial note by Arko Datto, Boaz Levin, Kerstin Meincke and  Bhooma Padmanabhan

Titled Maps of Disquiet, the 3rd edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, reflects on the exigencies of our times: resisting majoritarian impositions, ecological collapse, and technological dystopias by reclaiming pluralities of thought, voices, and art, and building new networks of solidarity and care. In today’s world of highly specialized fields of operation, rigid chains of command and niche disciplinary focus, a space such as a biennale offers the possibility of rethinking our futures through broader parameters that address the complexity of the disquiet that we are experiencing.

The site of the 'Great Trigonometrical Survey' of 1802, the first colonial attempt to measure and map the subcontinent, Chennai today is an arena for the creation of resistant cartographies. The biennale illuminates the invisible realms of power and knowledge that shape our global present while simultaneously navigating contested visions of our global future. It asks, whose resources? Whose rivers? Whose interests? Whose voices? Whose images?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 PHOTOBOOKS ~ ART PAGE BY PAGE 

Exhibition and Publication

Grassi Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig Germany, Nov 2021 - March 2022

 ++studio wall, december 2021++

 

Dialogue— 21 Artists Who Reshaped Contemporary Photography 

（《对话——21位重塑当代摄影的艺术家》）

Edited by Joanna Fu, Zhejiang Photographic Press

 

 ~ Dapper Dan Magazine ~