Potential Exhibition

In January 2023, nine photographers, anthropologists, artists, and writers attended a two-day workshop titled Counter Archives, Potential Histories at KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße, led by İpek Çınar. The workshop aimed to question power relations, hierarchies, and authorities both in front of and behind the camera, while charting new paths to tell participatory, non-hierarchical, and diverse stories. Since the workshop, the participants have been meeting regularly as a collective to discuss their ongoing works.

The greatest claim of photography since its invention has been to “show the real," and it has become a tool for writing history. However, colonial powers and their ideological agencies have excluded millions of people from the history and theory of photography, neglecting their voices and positionalities. Photography has been used to seize power from the people who are the rightful owners, with those behind the camera deciding what is shown and what messages are conveyed. How can we play with these structures when dealing with archives? Is there a way to subvert existing hierarchies between photographers and subjects that imply that the former are the ones who "share" or "represent," even when the verbs most often associated with photography are "take" or “capture”?

Potential Exhibition uses these questions as a starting point to create participatory, latent and individual stories using photography and various media such as fabrics, field recordings, fiction, and food. Diverging from conventional notions of image-making, the exhibition invites audiences to interact with and co-develop artworks in an iterative and continuous process that expands the potentialities of photography.

Participating Artists:
Elsa Benamouzig
Roni Bogin
Julianne Chua
İpek Çınar
Haley Hoyer
Anna Frehiwot Maconi
Anastasiia Nurullina
Kristina Vasilevskaja