INTO THE UNSEEN

THE WALTHER COLLECTION is considered one of the world’s most renowned collections of global photography. This exhibition marks the final major presentation of the collection in Europe before 6,500 works are gifted to THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART in New York.

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‍INTO THE UNSEEN challenges visitors to look beyond the visible and make the unseen – the mystical, the repressed, or the elusive – perceptible by activating photography’s audible, tactile, and emotional registers.

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This multisensory exhibition thus engages critiques of the dominance of vision by charting a more expansive understanding of photography and embracing a new poetics of the unseen. INTO THE UNSEEN features works by, among others, Cang Xin, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Santu Mofokeng, Eadweard Muybridge, Jo Ractliffe, RongRong, Berni Searle, and Yang Fudong, as well as a new sound work by photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán and a new photo installation by Ana María Gómez López.

‍The curatorial concept of the exhibition asks what photography can be beyond detached viewing. Rather than a neutral technology of representation, photography is presented as a medium that generates both connection and resistance. In this way, it eschews any notion of vision as a privileged sensory register and presenting it instead as inseparably linked to a multi-sensory engagement with the world around us.Unlike a traditional white cube gallery, the exhibition design leads visitors into dark rooms where images float organically and walls release a distinctive scent. Small architectural structures crafted from local Douglas fir create intimate spaces for viewing vernacular photographs, scientific studies, and family albums. The wood has been treated using traditional Japanese Yakisugi techniques, which give it a deep black, shimmering surface with a pronounced sculptural grain.

The choice of wall colors, textiles, and colored-infused ceilings challenges the fiction of detached looking by creating sense of embeddedness in the artwork. In this way, the exhibition itself takes a multisensory approach to the installation of artworks — a curatorial intervention that intensifies the experience of engaging art by activating the full range of our senses.