between the skin and sea, Chose Commune, pre-order here
Friday 30 August 2024
Monday 15 July 2024
Monday 8 July 2024
Saturday 29 June 2024
Monday 24 June 2024
Saturday 15 June 2024
Tuesday 23 April 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.
Wednesday 3 April 2024
the kids are in trouble ~ Future Tense: Living the future now
Format Festival, Quad Derby UK, 03 - 06 2024
Tuesday 2 April 2024
Saturday 30 March 2024
Sunday 10 March 2024
Wednesday 20 December 2023
Saturday 4 November 2023
Sunday 8 October 2023
Tuesday 8 August 2023
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
Tuesday 20 June 2023
Wednesday 17 May 2023
Saturday 22 April 2023
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
Thursday 30 March 2023
In conversation, Slippery Images,
National Gallery of Victoria ~~~
Curator Maggie Finch ~~ with
artists Kirsten Lyttle, Rudi
Williams and Katrin Koenning
Tuesday 14 March 2023
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 GamalaÅga, 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
Tuesday 3 January 2023
Palmtree Photoworkshops
Santorini Greece + 2023
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.
Tuesday 29 November 2022
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.
Friday 14 October 2022
Acquisition, untitled (shelter) from between the river and the sea 2021,
Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, HOTA Gold Coast
Saturday 17 September 2022
Wednesday 27 July 2022
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.