British Journal of Photography (IG Takeover)

Perimeter Talks: In Conversation with Dan Rule

Perimeter is thrilled to continue its new programming initiative for 2017: Perimeter Talks. Taking place approximately once a month on a Sunday afternoon, the series features lectures, panel discussions and more casual in-conversations with publishers, artists, curators, designers, writers and editors. The talks explore and address various themes and issues relating to contemporary photographic, art and design publishing – helping demystify, challenge and offer insight into publishing as a medium and a practice.

Our second talk for 2017 features Melbourne-based German photographer Katrin Koenning, whose debut book Astres Noir (Chose Commune, Paris) – which drew upon images that Koenning and Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick had made for their Instagram feeds – went on to become an international phenomenon, making the final shortlist of the prestigious 2016 Paris Photo-Aperture Photo Book Award and winning the 2016 Australian Photobook of the Year Award. The talk will explore the making of the project, Koenning's wider practice and the bleed between Instagram and more traditional photographic contexts.

Where: Perimeter Books, 748 High Street, Thornbury. When: Sunday March 12, 3pm-4pm. Seating strictly limited. RSVP essential (hello@perimeterbooks.com). $5 donation on the door.

 Organ Vida Photography Festival 2017 open call jury: Sean O'Hagan, Christina de Middel, Dana Lixenberg, Pieter Hugo, Leila Topić and Katrin Koenning.

Commission, Organ Vida 2017 theme essay: New Citizens

NEW CITIZENS

Right now, no matter where we are, we find ourselves in a fireball of political confusion that sees us descending rapidly into liberal authoritarianism, fascism and border-euphoria, and in which humanism is under grave threat. It seems all the more important then to find and draw on what connects us. United in a new and bottomless placelessness (whether physical, metaphorical or virtual), our mechanisms of exclusion and our judgement of each other are still so fiercely place-attached. In this instalment of the festival, following on from examining Revelations, we are concerned with expanded and creative thinking around notions of New Citizen. We ask: who are we as humans? How did we come to be this way, where are we headed? What does it mean to be participant of an utterly computerised 21st Century that pulls us ever closer together, yet paradoxically, even further apart? In this era, our collective knowledge is richer than it ever was, yet we’ve lost sight of ourselves. Are we traversing an ocean of possibility while sinking under our own weight? In a world where the borders of real and imagined are incessantly blurring yet sharper than ever defined, is the very concept of belonging itself drifting away from the physical realm into another? Perhaps New Citizen is the individual we ought to strive to be. As a species wandering dangerously close to the edge of itself, New Citizen cannot be understood as a label or fixed term. New Citizen encourages: a politic of transformation and a thinking of indefiniteness of what describes identity and ultimately us as humans; a humanity of insiders concerned about the state of a distressed world in which politicisation of space and violent legacy of white dominance have long caused the mentioned to require new balance. It is about us as a society, addressing the collective state of urgency in which we find ourselves. In this sense, New Citizen advocates a need of breaking out, of acting, of mobilising towards a new and shared horizon. The New Citizen is global more than ever, a cosmopolite; a human being most of all who always comes from story. We are calling for the artist-communicator equipped with the power of language to show us a voice of dissent, challenging and foraging against the very things that are made by systems in power to keep us divided. We ask for your views of a New Citizen that far extend the conventional understandings of its ‘origin-definition’ which is confined to state and city and town; we ask you to think citizen as a anywhere-human, beyond entitlement, nationality or allegiance to government. Show us counter-language; a new way of navigating what it means to be alive and to live in a (post)capitalist, climate-changed 21st Century world. Whatever your photographic approach may be, show us new dialogues and new imaginaries. We ask: who or what are we as image-makers reflecting on the world in which we live? Where are our stories of unmapping, our stories of stories? How do we navigate this world of image and this world of World as people drawing from the toolset of communication? What is it like to be, now, as New Citizen in this, our time? What are our responsibilities, collectively and individually, to the world and to each other, in and towards a change of course? And what kind of boat can carry us together into the world of World that needs us less than ever?     -   Katrin Koenning

Indefinitely, Phases Magazine

 

 

'With her series entitled 'Indefinitely', Katrin Koenning invites us to wander through a universe that is 'decardinalised', wandering in such a way as to resist static vision and spatiotemporal points of reference. These disorientating effects plunge us into a confusion between day and night, a confusion of seasons, a confusion between the world of humans and animals, a consufion between the world of the dead and the living. The imaginary world becomes immense, just as the vast expanse of salt water that washes over the globe is immense, and we are no longer therefore faced with images, but instead with images of the mind.' - Jerome Montagne

Astres Noirs wins Australian Photobook of the Year Award

Photobook Reviewer, Unless You Will & Momento Pro / Photography Studies College

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