Dear Chris at Chobi Mela IX, Beauty Boarding, Old Dhaka Bangladesh

 

Artist Talk & Portfolio Reviews, Chobi Mela IX

Commission, California Sunday Magazine

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

Absolutely delighted to be a winner of Joerg Colberg's prestigious Conscientious Portfolio Competition.

Colberg, who picked my work (Indefinitely), writes: “Pictures are more than what they are as pictures. They also are what we bring to them. Possibly my choice is in part a reflection of how I have been feeling about the state of this world since this year’s events have taken humanity back to a very dark place. Indefinitely for sure is dark and somber. Yet it contains traces of hope, of it being a dream. We don’t know, yet, whether it’s about to become a nightmare or whether it will end well.”

Astres Noirs, photobook of the year:

The Guardian  - Sean O'Hagan

Photoeye - Eamonn Doyle and Daniel Boetker-Smith 

Colin Pantall 

Lens Culture - Erik Vroons, Peggy-Sue Amison, Francoise Callier, Regina Anzenberger 

The New Yorker Photo (takeover)

Astres Noirs selected for TIME's Best Photobooks of the Year  

"Astres Noirs is an ethereal, other-worldly experience; figures bathe in half light, galactic dust clouds disrupt familiar landscapes and alien jellyfish seem to be suspended in motion. The duotone printing shimmers with an unique silver quality, providing an astonishingly beautiful publication with a tactility not often experienced in the photobook".

Astres Noirs, Paris Photo Aperture First Photobook Award finalist

Installation view, Young International Photographers, Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea

Dear Chris, CHOBI MELA IX, Bangladesh 2017

Indefinitely as part of 'Belonging', Obscura Festival, Penang Malaysia

Indefinitely, YET Magazine, with text by Matilde Scaramellini

'Indefinitely is that moment of intimate silence that binds us to life, that freezes time, action, judgment. It's the space between reality and imagination. It's the transition from sleep to the perception of the new day's sun. Katrin Koenning captures observation itself, in its purity; her shots translate a sense of pause that has to do with listening.'

Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick - Towards the Light / Astres Noirs review by Sunil Shah, American Suburb X

'Completely captivated by the photographic possibilities of light, both artists come at the medium with a desire to seek the extraordinary in order to access invisible states of consciousness...The essence of both their work, therefore, appears to be rooted in the personal and meditative relationship they have with metaphysical thought and less with rigid notions of representing a photographic reality. Astres Noirs gives us an insight into their supernatural vision through these fairly eclectic astral projections...Having been a follower of both Koenning and Protick for some time on Instagram, often being mesmerised by their images and regularly dumbfounded at how they might have been created, I was beautifully reminded of the very natural affinity both artists have towards a higher state of consciousness.'

Lars Boering, managing director at World Press Photo, on The Crossing, Noorderlicht Festival, NL

'Astres Noirs' book launch, Friday July 1, 8pm, Le Bal, Paris.

 

 

Dear Chris, The Leftovers, Verge Gallery Sydney

The Crossing as part of CCP Declares: On the Social Contract, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Australia, 27/05 - 10/07

Curated by Pippa Milne, CCP Declares: On the Social Contract draws together emerging and mid-career artists working at the forefront of Australian photography and video in its expanded field. The subtitle to this second iteration of CCP Declares acknowledges that these works examine or extend the idea of social contract theory; the idea that moral and political obligations and rights are bound upon an intrinsic agreement amongst the various constituents of a society.

Indefinitely solo show, The Lost Ones Gallery, Ballarat VIC

A Country big enough to Disappear In, The Adventure Handbook

'Koenning’s environment is one not solely of nature, but of human interference in the ritual of place making – and yet, the opportunity remains to insulate artefacts of history under gentle observation, in order to explore the entrenched narratives of each frame...'

The Crossing (Transfer), Australian Centre for Photography Sydney, 16 April - 15 May

Interview, Fotografia Magazine

Documentum (Fall Line Press), New York Times Lens Blog 

Daylight digital feature (Indefinitely) with text by Dan Rule

'We’re left in a state of flux – the tension between connection and disconnection ever present.'  

 'Light floods the frame. Bleached flares of afternoon sun gently inundate an otherwise lush woodland scene, its tangles of ferns, vines and low-lying foliage ensnaring the forest floor. It is a filter of haze, almost psychic in its effect. A proximate image describes a partial domestic scene, morning light creeping up a bedroom wall. It is adorned with a framed print of a classical still-life painting, a pair of pillows anchoring the composition at its base.'

Dan Rule

Solo Show, Indefinitely, Daylight Project Space (Hillsborough USA)

Indefinitely, curated projection (All the World's a Stage), Chennai Photo Biennale

This Howling Tasman Wind, Group Show, Terratory Journal
 

 Untitled from Lake Mountain, 2012

In our capitalist pursuit we thought we found progress, but in that, things got lost forever.  Now the urgency to halter manifests, knowing what is lost can’t resurrect. Our legacy is undeniably carved into everything we’ve touched; water, land, air. According to predictions measuring the effects of global warming, Australia counts among one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Increasingly extreme weather conditions threaten to impact destructively on the environment, biodiversity, infrastructure and community. During the 2009 Black Saturday Bush fires considerable damage was caused at Lake Mountain, a popular winter destination 120 km out of Melbourne, Australia, changing the site forever. Lake Mountain is a long-term study of this scarred and transitioning Australian landscape. Much of my practice is an inquiry into our physical and emotional connection to place and our relationship to that which surrounds us. At their core, my methodology and vernacular rotate around the idea of returning to things; I’ve held this mountain’s breath for six years. It’s through immersion that I can be part of a land. The return enables me to know, the knowing makes me love, the loving authors me.

You can Always see Orion, Landscape Stories (Outer Spaces)

 

 

A Country Big Enough to Disappear In, YEN Magazine feature

ISLAND

Moreton Bay Regional Council Art Collection Recent Acquisitions, Caboolture Regional Gallery

So happy to be featured by TIME as one of Alec Soth's 5 favourite instagrammers!

INTERVIEW, Photographic Museum of Humanity

INTERVIEW, Photographic Museum of Humanity

 

Firstly, Katrin, I would like to begin by asking how you came to photography. What is your professional background?


Photography came to me in a serious way through the death of my oldest childhood friend Tobias, who died in a plane crash above Iceland only weeks after we finished high school. He loved photography, and so I inherited his Minolta with all kinds of strange filters. I took the camera and went to Iceland for three months, to understand what had happened. It was here that I started the act of making conscious and considered pictures.


I then went on to intern with print and broadcast media in Germany, as well as with the Zeche Zollern Museum Photographic Department. I was interested in story, above anything. Some years later I relocated to Australia and studied Photography at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.




Your work Dear Chris is currently featured on PMH. Can you tell us about the story behind this series?


Dear Chris is a work in memory of Chris, who at age 29 lost his long fight with depression. The work is engaged with the connection between loss, ritual and memory, and is a confrontation with the agency of absence. Above all it is to say that Chris’ life was real, that he was here, and that his story matters.




In the series you confront a personal tragedy and engage with the often veiled subjects of death and suicide. How much of an emotional challenge was it to create this project?


It was very emotional, of course, but it was simply something that I knew needed to be done. I believe in practice as inquiry and sense making, and I didn’t want Chris to merely become another number in an accumulative pile of statistics. Globally, suicide is still something very taboo to speak of. If we’re so bloody good at sharing our ‘successes’ (when you scroll through facebook it seems as though just about every single person on earth has won the lottery at life!)– then why are we afraid to share our wounds? After all, they make for a significant part of the human experience. I wanted to dissent against silence, if in a small way. There was also a deep sense of responsibility as an artist to tell a difficult story when it needed to be told. As a family, we wanted to talk about Chris. Having an arts practice, I was the one equipped to do so.




The work is comprised of three interchangeable groups of photographs that together create a multilayered overview of Chris’s life. Was it a conscious decision to work in this way from the beginning or did the idea develop as the work progressed?


I knew how I wanted to make the work long before I started making it. It was important to me to have this kind of structured approach. I was very aware of avoiding a (visual) language that was dark, heavy or overly emotional, as I felt it might then become overbearing, too personal and less capable of speaking to a wider audience (more individually experienced and less shared). The actual execution of the individual pictures was challenging and involved a lot of problem solving. When you make work about someone who has died, there is this incredible dichotomy of presence and absence in everything that was somehow a marker of their lives, and you’re constantly thrown up against the limits of representation. The three ‘chapters’ were important because, when thinking about how I would present the work to an audience, I knew I wanted it to be interspersed, clustered and spatially loose. I found that this suited the nature of memory – non-linear.




How has your cousin and extended family reacted to the series?


From the very start, Alana and I worked together. Without her agreeing to and wanting me to make the work, I wouldn’t have made it. Our collaboration was a crucial part of the process. Trauma disrupts story, but story is the thing that keeps us from falling apart. To some degree the process was an active way for both of us to continue narrative.




Are there any specific messages that you would hope viewers take away from the series?


No, I don’t like to think of myself as a messenger, or as someone who directs an audience into feeling one particular way about something. I make my work because I want to share my idea or understanding of what it possibly means to be alive, and to be human.




Moving away from Dear Chris, I would like to learn more about your general artistic vision. You were born in Germany, but you are now currently based in Australia. How has the change of language and culture affected your practice?


I didn’t have a practice as such when I was living in Germany – that really happened in Australia. I think a lot about how place, culture and language affect your vision, and I wonder of course whether my work would be different had I studied in Germany. Well, I mean of course it would have to be different, but I just wonder to what extent. I’d like to think that something in my work was in me either way, independent of culture, language and continent. However the experience of distance and the curiosity around what it means to belong inform so much of what I do, and both stem from or were at least exacerbated by migration. If you wanted to get psychological you could argue that those quests were already in me long before I left one country and found another; that in fact they were born with me growing up as a ‘Scheidungskind’ (a ‘divorce’ child). Who knows. I think that my hosting of multiple worlds means I get to dissect and assemble multiple worlds too – a huge privilege, and perhaps my way of undoing distance.




How does the German photography framework compare and contrast to the scene in Australia?


This is an interesting question, and one that I’m not too sure I can answer adequately just yet (are you speaking of industry, or of language?). Almost everything I’ve come to learn and know about and through photography, I’ve acquired in Australia, and I’m only just really getting to discover how things work in Germany. By default, the German photography scene is larger of course than the one over here, and size affects either industry. German photography is lucky in the sense that it sits right on the pulse of the beast geographically. A lot of stuff happens in Europe, and proximity is such an important part to maintaining and furthering your practice. This geographical isolation of the Australian continent, so far removed from the rest of the world, seems to impact profoundly on how and whether local photography is seen and read overseas. Truth is that (apart from a handful of big names), Australian photography is really underrepresented internationally, which is sad, because some very good work is made here.




What projects do you have in the pipeline? What do you have planned for the next 12 months and beyond?


Oh! I’m working on the maximum number of projects I’ve ever worked on at once right now. I know I know – I’ve often told myself to stick to one at a time, but to no avail. It’s just the way I work apparently – in multiples, across a platform of different ideas, stories and methodologies. Somehow, the different projects inform each other and intersect. Sometimes I wonder whether this way of working has something to do with being multilingual, a place in which your brain tirelessly navigates various vernaculars, states and histories? This periphery or crossing of multiple worlds, the point at which a new one is made; that is what fascinates me more than anything.


Ha, ok sorry I got side tracked - some very exciting things are happening next year that I am not allowed to speak of just yet, but which I’m gearing up for. I can tell you this much: they involve movement, time, sound, and silence. They also involve (but aren’t limited to) travel, rubbish, darkness, birds, conformity, language and love.