Currency: Photography Beyond Capture 

Deichtorhallen Hamburg: Hall for Contemporary Art
May 20 – September 18, 2022

Currency: Photography Beyond Capture (Photographie jenseits der Aufnahme) explores artistic engagements with photography in the “retinal age,” where images not only act as records and imprints but fundamentally shape acts of seeing and being seen. Approaching photographs as sites of narrative invention rather than as documents of binding truth or essence, Currency considers how value and meaning are reimagined through conceptual approaches to the photographic image.

The exhibition weaves modes of experimental capture, appearance, multisensory evocation, archival and documentary practice. In staging works by visual artists and photographers, several motifs will structure Currency: the deconstruction and juxtaposition of visual canons; portrayals of community and social relations from within; countermapping in the Anthropocene across landscapes of extractive capitalism and military occupation; tenderness and the currency of intimacy beyond the conventions of portraiture; and poetic explorations into the alchemical processes of photography.

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

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

I walk through the times not the places,

I see my shadow but I follow it in a different city,

there is no nostalgia but the story begin or continue “there”

“there” is not opposite of “here”,

This is just another deja vu that happens in my head only.