MirrORs,
mANNinGHaM arT gaLLeRy ~ INstallatiOn anD deTAIL vIEw
Wednesday, 22 October 2025
Saturday, 11 October 2025
INTIMACY AND FRAGMENTS IN KATRIN KOENNING'S 'MIRRORS' ~ REVIEW, M-ARTLENS
On a spring afternoon in Doncaster, the Manningham Art Gallery hums with a quiet kind of attention. Housed within MC Square—a civic building more often associated with community services than contemporary art—the gallery doesn’t announce itself with grandeur. Its white walls and modest scale stand in deliberate contrast to the blockbuster venues of central Melbourne. And yet, stepping inside, one feels something expansive. Katrin Koenning’s Mirrors, which runs here until 18 October, gathers fragments from more than two decades of the artist’s archive into constellations that shimmer with intimacy, loss, and belonging.
The gallery’s own description of the show as “a powerful new exhibition…bringing everyday moments into focus” functions as a neat headline, but the exhibition itself goes further. What Koenning offers is not simply the elevation of the ordinary, but a quiet reimagining of how photographs live in relation to one another. Mirrors is not a retrospective; it does not attempt to tell the story of a career in neat sequence. Instead, the works form constellations: arrangements of small-scale prints that ask to be encountered relationally. Faces, landscapes, domestic gestures, and nonhuman presences hang together in clusters or loose grids — a form of constellational hanging, where meaning emerges in the interplay between images rather than from any single work. There are no explanatory captions to impose narrative. Instead, Koenning trusts her audience to discover connections, to pause in the silences between works, to let the fragments breathe.
Koenning herself articulates this ethos succinctly: “The picture is such a tiny part – the value lies in the act of relating and how these relations live in the world.” It is a statement that could serve as a manifesto for her entire practice. For more than twenty years, she has pursued photography not as proof or spectacle, but as relation: between people, within communities, and across the more-than-human world.
Fragments and Relations
Born in Dortmund in 1978, Koenning moved to Australia in 2003 and has since established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography. Her earlier series — The Crossing, Indefinitely, and others — each wrestled with questions of distance, kinship, and ecological entanglement. What unites them is an insistence on intimacy as both subject and method.
Mirrors distils those concerns into something quieter, yet no less resonant. By turning to her own archive, Koenning transforms the act of curation into a poetic gesture. The archive here is not treated as a storage cabinet of proofs, but as living tissue: porous, mutable, open to new relations. Photographs of people sit alongside images of animals, foliage, and weather, none given precedence. A portrait of a young woman finds echo in the curve of a tree branch; a window draped in fabric resonates with a coastal horizon.
One work, yanakie (one) (2021), anchors the exhibition’s tone. Modest in scale at 40 × 30 cm, it depicts a domestic window fogged with condensation, a curtain drifting slightly in muted light. On first glance, it is unremarkable — an image one might pass by. But the more one lingers, the more its fragility takes hold. It is the kind of photograph that insists intimacy resides not in spectacle but in the quiet persistence of the everyday. Another, Seaside Jiggle (2022), offers a shimmer of water, the edge of coastline blurred into abstraction. Together, these prints establish a register of modesty, refusing the monumental in favour of resonance.
The installation reflects this sensibility. Rather than lining works evenly in rows, Koenning arranges them into constellations. A trio of black-and-white portraits leans toward a single colour abstraction; across the room, a figure echoes the shape of a tree line. The walls become fields of relation, where meaning is not contained within individual images but emerges across them. This method places her in dialogue with Wolfgang Tillmans, whose constellational strategies collapse hierarchies between subjects. Yet Koenning’s approach is distinct: where Tillmans often revels in visual excess, Koenning leans toward quietude. Her constellations do not dazzle; they whisper.
This whispering tone aligns her more closely with Sophie Calle, who has long mined fragments of everyday life — letters, photographs, diary entries — to meditate on intimacy, loss, and absence. Like Calle, Koenning is less concerned with spectacle than with fragile registers of relation. And yet, her photographs remain resolutely her own: steeped in the textures of Australian light, shaped by the long arc of migration, and attuned to the ecological entanglements of her adopted home.
Belonging in the Everyday
What emerges most strongly in Mirrors is a vision of belonging that is fragile, provisional, and ecological. Koenning’s refusal to separate human from nonhuman is evident throughout: portraits sit comfortably beside images of trees, weather, and animals. Belonging here is not fixed identity but ongoing relation, a recognition that we live enmeshed with others — both human and more-than-human.
This ethos situates her alongside Australian contemporaries such as Hoda Afshar, Atong Atem, and Polly Borland. Koenning shares with them a commitment to photography as ethical encounter, but her register remains distinct: modest, porous, attentive to the fragile resonance of the ordinary.
Her international profile is substantial. She has exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, Chobi Mela in Bangladesh, and Paris Photo. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Zeit Magazin, Vogue.com, and Der Spiegel. Yet Mirrors is not an exhibition that consolidates reputation. It does not celebrate achievement so much as return to vulnerability: the condensation on glass, the shimmer of water, the fragments that hold us.
What lingers most is the exhibition’s radical modesty. In an age of spectacle — where images are designed to be scrolled, consumed, and forgotten — Koenning wagers that intimacy still matters. She asks her viewers to slow down, to attend, to let meaning emerge in the gaps between works. In doing so, she reminds us that photography’s power lies not in grand statements but in fragile encounters: condensation on glass, the shimmer of water, a shadow across a face.
As you step out of Manningham Art Gallery into the suburban air, the photographs remain — not as definitive images, but as traces. They hover, provisional and resonant, like light caught on a curtain or breath on a windowpane. Mirrors offers no conclusion. It offers something rarer: the possibility of relation, the fragile weave of belonging in the everyday.
Friday, 10 October 2025
Monday, 29 September 2025
Katrin Koenning, between the skin and sea
'...a masterpiece of a photobook that effortlessly pulls together everything you need in a good book (and, just as an aside, it casually incorporates a few colour pictures into the mostly black-and-white flow). There are a lot of photographs that you ordinarily do not see in photographers’ books: children playing or animals (including cats). It all comes together so well to present a world that is completely shaken up, a world under serious threat, and yet somehow, a hope prevails...'
' I often feel that there is a limit to what words can do, because ultimately, the best teacher is a perfectly made book itself.'
Sunday, 21 September 2025
Wednesday, 3 September 2025
Friday, 8 August 2025
Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Tuesday, 15 July 2025
Friday, 27 June 2025
Wednesday, 4 June 2025
Friday, 30 May 2025
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.'
Wednesday, 30 April 2025
Monday, 28 April 2025
Friday, 28 February 2025
Wednesday, 29 January 2025
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.'
Wednesday, 8 January 2025
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