Emoplux

Today, more and more contemporary artists are revisiting historical processes, questions of gender, and the potential power of images to confront the challenges and possibilities of our digital era. By turning to analog techniques and light-sensitive materials, or by re-examining public and personal archives, they assert a form of creative resistance against the increasing immateriality brought about by AI.

Photographer and visual artist Sylvie Bonnot, seeks to make photography more tangible by directly interacting with the materiality of the image. She peels the gelatin off her photographs and transfers it onto various surfaces, creating what she calls “moults.”

Marta Djourina explores different light phenomena as a medium in her photographic practice. She employs historical photographic techniques to capture the notion of touch. Photography thus becomes more dynamic through a gestural process that resembles painting.

By choosing abstraction and a certain pictorial quality in his series Zer-Störung, Raisan Hameed, a young German-Iraqi artist based in Leipzig, repurposes heavily damaged documents from his family archives, combining them with his own images taken in Mosul.

The artistic work of Austrian Simon Lehner, by merging various personal archival materials and digital documents, reconstructs or deconstructs memory and traumatic recollections.

Portuguese artist Paulo Simão presents a significant series of black-and-white photographs titled Erased, in which he appropriates archives from the U.S. Library of Congress and transforms them through erasure. From these monuments of important men, only the pedestal remains, serving as a testimony to past political contexts.

These emerging artistic approaches reflect a new awareness of the role of images and the responsibility of artists in an increasingly virtual world.