A conversation with Jörg Colberg, Conscientious Magazine

Between Realities Symposium: presentations by Max Pinckers, Katrin Koenning, Heikki Kaski, Sara-Lena_Maierhofer and Katherine Oktober-Matthews, Friday January 13th 10am - 6pm, University of Applied Sciences and Art, Dortmund, Germany

'Between Realities' is a one-day symposium addressing diverse photographic positions, which challenge the prevailing modes of visual representation and their supposed factual depiction of reality through the photographic medium.

Several international artists have been invited, who in practice blur the borders between fact and fiction, thus re-imagining and subverting the traditional visual conception of the documentary genre.

The intention of the presentations is to open the discussion about the truth of an absolute ‘objective’ photographic replication of reality. Is the reproduction of a pictorial unadulterated ‘objective truth’ an erroneous belief, a goal neither viable nor desirable?

 The Crossing in Beyond Mourning: Photography and Extinction, by Ella Mudie, Afterimage Vol 44

"What emerges over time from this immersion in place in Koenning’s practice is photography as a process of worlding. In The Crossing there is a sense in which each photograph offers a miniature portrait of a natural world on the cusp of disappearance. At the same time, there is ambiguity at play, especially in Koenning’s arresting images of fish and bird life hovering between states of appearance and disappearance, or processes of emergence and withdrawal. In Howqua #1 (Falsche Gezeiten, 2015), a tortoise shimmers in bioluminescent white light and appears as if plummeting into a dark void or falling through stars. Might this be the last tortoise, hurtling toward extinction or, more optimistically, can this sole tortoise be read as a symbol of species survival and thus an emblem of hope? Some images draw their titles from the work of Michel Serres and, indeed, The Crossing echoes the French philosopher’s call for “a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity.” As an embedded and deeply personal response to a transitioning ecology, Koenning’s images also embody what Zylinska terms a “post-anthropocentric ethics of expanded obligations.” This is ethics as “a way of taking responsibility, by the human, for various sorts of thickenings of the universe, across different scales, and of responding to the tangled mesh of everyday connections and relations."

Indefinitely published in Heavy Vol II

"With the experience of being displaced from a homeland comes a continuous process of re-placement, through transcending traditional physical boundaries and traditional methods of psychological interactions. An anti-linear or disjunctive order emerges from this constant state of interpretation. Imagined borders give way to imagined worlds and newly created homes. Invariably and spontaneously responding to what surrounds and inhabits her when photographing, Koenning’s aesthetic varies, adjusting itself to the environment and the experiences that produce it, never following a formula. Just like a continuous shaft of light full of glimmering dust, constantly fluctuating, and without boundaries, Indefinitely redefines the notion of distance associated with the migratory experience by filling it with the most simple and intense visual poems.” — Claire Monneraye, Curator, Australian Centre for Photography