The exhibition CURRENCY: PHOTOGRAPHY BEYOND CAPTURE at Deichtorhallen Hamburg explores conceptual engagements with photography in the »retinal age«. In our accelerated era of circulation and instrumentation, images not only act as records of events and imprints of experience but also fundamentally shape acts of seeing and being seen.

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Approaching photographs as contextual frames for narrative invention, the exhibition critically considers how knowledge has been sought through the photographic apparatus over the course of its history and reimagined by artists and photographers through conceptual and poetic approaches to the medium. Currency looks at how these practitioners have challenged the meaning and value of photographic images and investigated the extended lives, temporalities, and materialities of image cultures beyond the moment of capture.

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The exhibition weaves experimental modes of appearance, multisensory evocation, and archival and documentary practice as novel possibilities and vocabularies for seeing and interpreting. In staging works by twenty-nine artists and photographers, the exhibition draws connections across geographies and eras, tracing intergenerational and transnational affinities through several motifs: the deconstruction and transformation of photographic canons; countermapping in the Anthropocene across landscapes of extractive capitalism, military occupation, and appropriation; tenderness as a relational framework for photography; and material explorations into the medium’s alchemical processes. These motifs structure Currency and offer through lines across a range of perspectives.

The exhibition will take place from May 20 to September 18, 2022 as part of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg.

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ARTISTS

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Claudia Andujar, Ziad Antar, Vartan Avakian, Ragnar Axelsson, Edson Chagas, rana elnemr, Oroma Elewa, Anne-Marie Filaire, Lyle Ashton Harris, Leslie Hewitt, Alfredo Jaar, Lebohang Kganye, Clifford Prince King, Osamu James Nakagawa, Guevara Namer, Marilyn Nance, Mame-Diarra Niang, Otobong Nkanga, Elle Pérez, Jo Ractliffe, Ashfika Rahman, Cecilia Reynoso, RaMell Ross, Fazal Sheikh, Alexey Vasilyev, Carrie Yamaoka, Raed Yassin, Paul Yeung

Curated by Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti, Gabriella Beckhurst Feijoo und Oluremi C. Onabanjo

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HALL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

‍HAMBURG

Deichtorplatz 1, Hamburg

‍OPEN TODAY FROM 11:00 AM TO 6:00 PM

until 18 september 2022

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