Potential exhibition

In January 2023, nine photographers, anthropologists, artists and writers took part in a two-day workshop entitled Counter Archives, Potential Histories in the KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße, which was directed by İpek Çınar. The aim of the workshop was to question power relations, hierarchies and authorities in front of and behind the camera and to find new ways to tell participatory, non-hierarchical and diverse stories. Since the workshop, participants have met regularly as a collective to discuss their ongoing work.

Since its invention, photography's greatest claim has been to "show the real," and it has become a tool of historiography. However, colonial powers and their representatives excluded millions of people from the history and theory of photography and neglected their voices and positions. Photography has been used to take power away 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 undermine the existing hierarchies between photographers and subjects, which imply that the former are the ones who "share" or "represent", even if the verbs most often associated with photography are "record" or are "capturing"?

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. The exhibition deviates from conventional ideas about image creation and invites the audience to interact with the artworks and develop them in an iterative and continuous process that expands the possibilities of photography.

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