Instagram · joachimfroese.com

Every photographic image — analogue or digital, historical or contemporary — has a limited lifespan. For this artist, the fragile threshold between permanence and loss is not merely a technical challenge to overcome. It is the central subject of the work itself.

He joined our latest VSG session from a residency at The Local Air Valencia, moving between his two homes: Brisbane, where he is based, and Berlin, where his next major exhibition will open in August. Photographer, academic, and educator, he spoke about these roles as inseparable parts of the same practice. Teaching, he was quick to emphasise, matters as deeply to him as making the work itself.

Salt, Silver, and Sunlight

At the centre of his current practice stands salt printing — the earliest working photographic process, presented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. The method sounds deceptively simple: a sheet of watercolour paper is floated on a salt solution, coated with silver nitrate, layered with a negative, exposed to ultraviolet light, then washed in another salt solution, washed again, and fixed. From start to finish, a single print can take four to five hours to produce.

It took him nearly a year of ongoing experimentation before he felt he had sufficient control over the process to use it for serious work. Salt printing is acutely sensitive to its environment. Temperature, humidity, and atmospheric conditions all shape the final image. A cold rainy day yields a different print from a hot summer afternoon. No two works are ever exactly alike.

For him, this unpredictability is not a flaw to be eliminated but an essential part of the medium itself.

His series Entangled centres on seedlings cultivated specifically for the project, tracing the intertwined histories of photography and botany. Both Talbot and John Herschel — two pivotal figures in the invention of photography — were also botanists, and the work draws on this shared lineage. At the same time, the series gestures toward a broader reflection on the entanglement of human and plant life, each subject to cycles of growth, transformation, and decay.

His more recent series, Alchemy, exhibited in Brisbane earlier this year, turns to scientific glassware, skeletons, and decaying fruit. The fractured laboratory vessels evoke a damaged relationship: with the environment, with chemistry, and with photography itself. These objects belong to the material world of analogue image-making, and their breakage signals a rupture between that tactile history and the immaterial logic of the digital present.

Despite the painstakingly handmade nature of the final works — including frames he constructs himself — the source image always begins as a digital file. It is a tension he deliberately sustains between old and new technologies, permanence and fragility, control and contingency.

A Mirage of Another Planet

The most conceptually ambitious body of work he presented is Turned Towards the Firmament.

The title quotes the French scientist François Arago who in 1839 in Paris launched another historic photographic process: the daguerreotype. In his address, he speculated that photography one day might be 'turned towards the firmament' to reveal distant planets, their atmospheres, and geological formations. What seemed like fantasy at the time has since become reality. Since 2004, NASA's Mars rovers have transmitted detailed images of the Martian surface — landscapes that appear strangely Earth-like yet remain fundamentally alien and hostile to human life.

Drawing on imagery downloaded from NASA's archives, Froese translates photographs of the Martian surface into salt prints which he doesn't fix. The prints are washed and stabilised, but they remain sensitive to ultraviolet light and are therefore destined to shift, fade, and ultimately disappear.

Each print is housed in a folder, featuring a digital reproduction of the print inside. Visitors are invited to remove the folder from the wall and carry it to a designated viewing area to examine the original print under dimmed interior light. If taken into daylight, the image would slowly darken and eventually vanish.

For his forthcoming exhibition at Brotfabrik Gallery in Berlin — opening on 14 August and running for six weeks — he is extending the project into a far more ambitious installation: a large-scale Martian landscape composed of 107 completely untreated prints. The work depicts a terrain no human being has ever physically seen, assembled from machine-generated images transmitted across space. The entire panel will begin to fade and ultimately disappear within seven to ten days.

Every third day, Froese will return to the gallery to reprint sections of the work. The exhibition becomes not only an installation but an act of continual maintenance — an attempt to sustain a mirage against its inevitable disappearance.

In his view, the dream of human colonisation depends less on scientific reality than on photographic persuasion. Without images of the Martian surface, few people would imagine it as a destination at all. The photographs render the planet strangely familiar: expansive horizons, rocky terrain, landscapes that appear traversable, even inhabitable. Yet they remain an environment toxic to humans.

The endlessly fading and restored panel quietly reflects on this tension between image and belief. At the same time, it reaches toward something older and more fundamental: photography's enduring relationship to mortality, disappearance, and the unstable nature of memory itself.

Photography and Death

For Froese this relation is theoretical but also personal. In 2006 he cared for his mother who was dying of cancer. During this time, he made a work called Portrait of My Mother, for which he photographed every book she ever owned rather than her face. This portrait shows her knowledge and a life lived — not what she looked like.

The idea that photography is a construction is central to his work. Photography does not simply reveal reality; it shapes the way reality is seen. Professional photographers understand this instinctively, while many people still hold to the belief that the camera records the world objectively. But photographs are always framed by decisions: where to look, what to include, what to exclude, and how to interpret what appears before the lens.

The VSG group brought their own perspectives into this. Gotza offered a shamanic framework: time is not linear but spiral — all moments exist simultaneously, not receding into the past but remaining present in a different layer of time. The shaman does not go "back" to retrieve something lost; they navigate to where it still exists. Photography, from this angle, is not a capture of something gone but a technology for making the always-present briefly visible.

He found this compelling and added a historical dimension: this entire framework of visual memory is only about 100 years old. Before photography was accessible to ordinary people — roughly from the 1920s onward — you did not have your own life in images. You had stories, written documents, perhaps a painted portrait if you were wealthy. Photography changed something fundamental about how humans experience time, memory, and identity.

How Technology Changes the Way We Think

Joachim Froese moves fluidly between historical and emerging technologies — from salt printing and analogue processes to digital photography and, more recently, artificial intelligence. During his residency in Valencia, he began experimenting with Adobe Firefly, integrated into Adobe Photoshop, as part of a new body of work inspired by La Seo Cathedral, home to one of Europe's most significant collections of medieval tapestries.

While studying the densely woven imagery, he became fascinated by the animals partially concealed within the compositions — dragons, bears, and other fragmented creatures embedded in the fabric. Cropping these details from photographs of the tapestries, he used AI tools to imagine and generate their missing bodies, later presenting the resulting images as a handmade shadowbox.

The project emerged partly from a desire to understand a new technology through direct experimentation. Yet it also connects to a recurring concern throughout his practice: the use of contemporary tools to re-examine historical material, bringing the oldest forms of image-making into dialogue with the newest. Across these works, the question is less about technological novelty than about what each medium enables, transforms, or obscures.

He approaches AI with caution rather than enthusiasm. His principal concern is environmental: the immense energy demands required to sustain large-scale AI systems. He compared the growing infrastructure behind generative AI to the resource consumption associated with cryptocurrency mining.

More broadly, his work examines how technologies reshape perception itself. Digital photography offered mobility and freedom: the ability to work from a laptop anywhere in the world, to move into colour without the toxic chemistry of traditional darkrooms, and to embrace a faster, more flexible workflow. Salt printing, by contrast, reintroduced slowness, tactility, and an intimate responsiveness to environmental conditions.

"These different technologies make us work in different ways," he reflected. "They change the way we use the medium, and they change the way we perceive it."

Being Prepared When the Door Opens

Late in the conversation, after the formal presentation had ended and the discussion became more relaxed, the focus shifted toward professional practice — documentation, visibility, and readiness.

He recalled an incident from early in his career. A curator organising a major travelling exhibition of Australian photography contacted him on a Thursday afternoon requesting slides of his work. In the pre-digital era, portfolios still travelled by mail, but he already had a prepared set of slides ready to send. They arrived on the curator's desk the next morning, while several other artists responded days later. He got the exhibition.

"It wasn't only the quality of the work," he said. "It was being professionally prepared when the opportunity appeared."

That same pragmatism shapes his approach to documentation. A website, he argued, remains the backbone of a professional practice: comprehensive, updated regularly, and carefully archived. Instagram is secondary but still important. He admitted resisting the platform for years and believes that reluctance affected his visibility. Now he photographs exhibitions before opening and posts documentation while the work is still on view.

On social media, his philosophy is simple: quality over volume. Frequent posting without substance quickly becomes noise. Less frequent, more considered updates are ultimately more valuable.

What exists online, he noted, is not the artwork itself but its documentation — and for most people, that documentation will be their only encounter with the work. If artists choose to participate in the exhibition world, the professional framework needs to be in place before the opportunity arrives, not assembled afterward in haste.

If you want to follow Joachim on Instagram: @joachimfroese

Instagram · kubrakopruluogluasanli.myportfolio.com

There is a kind of portraiture that is not about likeness. It is about debt.

Kübra has spent years painting faces — women artists that art history filed away, indigenous communities that modernity has been trying to erase for centuries. She paints them on an iPad, in Adobe Fresco, layer by layer, hour by hour. She prints them on textured archival paper so that when someone walks into a gallery, they see a painting. They only discover it was made digitally when they read the label. She considers this a kind of solution. Not a trick.

The Forest First

Before the portraits, there was the forest.

In 2010, Kübra and her partner Melih — both artists, both restless in Istanbul — made a decision that most people consider and then abandon. They left the city entirely. They found land. They built a house with their own hands, using earth insulation and mixed techniques, no electricity during construction, finished in three months. They called their studio Harmonia and lived off-grid for six years: solar panels, rainwater collection, a composting system, a small wetland to filter kitchen water back into the soil. They grew their own food and planted trees. They made bread. They raised a child.

Melih wrote a book about ecological building techniques in 2016. It became widely read across Turkey.

What they had wanted, Kübra explained, was not just a simpler life but a learning community — a place where people could come, connect with nature, and make things together. And for a time, that is what happened. Workshops on ecological design, on art activism, on the traditional crafts of local women's cooperatives who had been making things for centuries but had never been asked to think about contemporary context. Lectures. Residencies of a kind. A community that gathered around a piece of land and then dispersed, changed.

The loneliness was the one thing they had not anticipated. Istanbul had given them an artist community dense with people they loved. The forest gave them everything else and took that away.

Making the Invisible Visible

The series that brought Kübra to international exhibitions began with an irritation.

In art history classes, she kept noticing the language: women artists. As if the qualifier were necessary. As if the default artist were something else. She decided she would paint them — not to illustrate a thesis, but because she felt a genuine obligation. These people had made remarkable work under circumstances that were designed to stop them, and most of them you would not recognise on the street.

She researches each subject deeply before touching the iPad. She reads interviews, letters where they exist, documentary material. For Hilma af Klint, she started and stopped — she could not find a reliable portrait, could not confirm the colour of her eyes, could not make her real enough. She set that one aside. Maybe she will find more material one day.

For Frida Kahlo, she used photographs as a starting point but deliberately changed the expression. In all the photographs, she found pain. She wanted to give Frida something she had not often been given: a witty look, something hopeful. Whether or not Frida ever looked that way in life is not the point. It is what Kübra felt the work required.

By working on portraits of women artists who were marginalised in art history but whose value has been recognised years later, she aimed to create an exhibition that not only paves the way for contemporary women artists but also defines their perspectives, conveys their philosophies, and allows us to reconnect with them. Each finished portrait is accompanied by printed text and a QR code. She wants visitors to leave knowing not just a face but a philosophy, a struggle, a life.

Indigenous, Imagined, and Real

The second series — Wisdom Keepers — works differently.

In Kübra's words: In recent years my main focus has been on the women of indigenous communities. Despite increasing recognition of their rights, many indigenous peoples still face challenges in representation, justice, and continuity. At the same time, they are the custodians of ancestral knowledge that has been preserved and transmitted for generations — knowledge that holds vital relevance in today's ecological crisis. Women, in particular, occupy a central role as both the primary carriers of this knowledge and as individuals subjected to layered forms of discrimination. Through art, storytelling, and cultural expression, I seek to make their heritage visible, and inspire collective awareness. It is my way of honouring and empowering those who have safeguarded this wisdom for centuries.

Here, Kübra is not reconstructing actual individuals but imagining them — composites built from extensive research into clothing, tattoos, hairstyles, documented photography, interviews with foundations that work alongside these communities. The Haenyeo divers of South Korea, who collect from the ocean floor without oxygen tanks, taking only what they find with bare hands. San people of the Kalahari. Arctic communities. Aboriginal Australians. Native Americans. A Romani woman from Europe.

One of the works won an award at the Busan Environmental Art Festival.

River, a fellow VSG member and digital artist who also works in Adobe Fresco, raised something important during the discussion: the growing difficulty of explaining that digital work is handmade. Open calls increasingly ban "computer-generated art" without distinguishing between an AI prompt and the thousands of hours of layered mark-making that go into a work like Kübra's. The cultural confusion between digital and automated is real, and it is costing some artists their exhibitions.

Kübra's answer is the paper. When people encounter her work printed on archival stock — the texture, the weight, the way light moves across the surface — they do not think about software. They think about painting. The revelation that it was made on an iPad arrives afterward, and by then they have already stood close to it and felt something.

Kübra continues to develop the project; she wants to bring together painting (digital and traditional), video, sound, and spatial installations to create a multi-sensory environment — an exhibition not to be seen only, but to be experienced. Over time, these works and portraits are also intended to form the basis of an evolving archival narrative.

What the Forest Left Behind

Kübra and Melih left the land when their daughter needed a school. The house is still there. They visit.

Near the end of the session, someone asked about it — whether it could become something again. The question opened quickly into something larger. A residency. Artists coming for a summer, learning to live differently for two weeks, being left to figure some of it out on their own. Kübra teaching what she knows about systems, materials, food, land. Then going home to the city.

She did not dismiss the idea. She said she would need to think about it.

The knowledge she and Melih accumulated over six years — about building, growing, making, teaching — is the kind of knowledge that tends to disappear when the people who hold it return to ordinary life. It would be something, to find a form for it. To make it available without having to live it again full time.

That, perhaps, is also a kind of portraiture.

Kübra's life in the woods: Watch on YouTube

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Maren Götzmann is a Brisbane and Berlin-based visual artist working across drawing, printmaking, artist books, and textiles. Her practice explores dis/placement, migration, and the positioning of humans within the world — how people situate themselves geographically, culturally, and philosophically, especially those who have moved between countries and keep moving. She studied in Munich, migrated to Australia with her partner Joachim Froese in 1991, and completed a second arts degree there, combining studio practice with art history. She has been moving between Brisbane and Berlin ever since.

She was joining the VSG session from Valencia, where she and Joachim were doing a residency at The Local AIR, and she presented a varied body of work spanning several decades — textile pieces, numerous drawing series (some of them ongoing), and work with a long-running collaborative collective. The conversation that followed touched on the art market, the algorithm, and what it means to make work that is genuinely built from and made for exchange rather than individual success.

Heimat

A recurring thread in Götzmann's work is the German concept of Heimat — a term with no precise English equivalent. It gestures toward belonging and origin, but extends beyond geography to encompass cultural, social, and emotional rootedness. For an artist who has lived across multiple countries and continues to move between them, Heimat is not a fixed condition but an open, returning question.

Her triptych Lifelines (2008) reflects on how those forced to leave their Heimat sustain and reconfigure their sense of continuity, renegotiating their place in the world. The three 100 × 80 cm works, painstakingly hand-stitched and reverse-appliquéd, unfold as quiet meditations on the paths one chooses — or is fated with — over a lifetime.

The motif of the roaring deer — a traditional emblem of Heimat in Germany — reappears in Heimat (2017), a two-part work rendered in black silk thread on white silk fabric, each held within a 40 cm embroidery hoop. Here, Götzmann uses stitch as a form of drawing, a fluid approach that allows her to move seamlessly between textile and line. The stag, at once familiar and faintly sentimental, may still roar, but its authority has waned. Heimat, for Götzmann, no longer resides in a singular place, but across many.

Cloth and Memory

Touched (2020) is among the most personal works Götzmann presented. Composed of 40 × 40 cm fabric squares, each brings together fragments of intimate garments donated by close female friends — nightgowns, underwear, bed sheets, tablecloths — shaped by proximity to the body and the rhythms of everyday life. Some of these women have since passed away, lending the work an added layer of poignancy. Assembled by hand, the composition recalls an abstract quilt yet remains deliberately unquilted: the seams are left visible, the joins unhidden, allowing each fragment's history to remain legible. The result hovers between artwork and memorial, a quiet act of holding and remembrance.

Alongside this deeply personal practice, Götzmann collaborates with textile artist Sylvia Watt, united by a shared commitment to natural materials and to processes of reuse, reinvention, and upcycling — an approach that stands in deliberate counterpoint to the excesses of global fashion production and consumption. Their one-off wearable art works, sold through Brisbane outlets, draw on pre-used kimonos as well as recycled linen, cotton, and silk, often incorporating the Japanese boro tradition of layering and mending cloth.

Across these textile practices, a consistent logic emerges: fabric that has been worn, handled, and lived with carries traces of experience. It holds memory. And for Götzmann, that is something worth attending to.

The Only Constant

Amid years of movement, drawing has remained the most consistent thread in Götzmann's practice. Working primarily in small formats — 15 × 15 cm pieces she can carry, transport, and resume across cities — she has developed a portable, ongoing way of seeing. The Berlin Diaries, begun in 2014 and continuing today, bring together drawing, printmaking, watercolour, and collage in entries that accumulate at times daily. Rather than documenting events, they register impressions: shifts in attention, fleeting conditions, the texture of lived experience.

"The only component that is constant is my drawing. I mostly work in small formats — drawings I can take with me wherever I go."

This question of position — of where and how one stands — also runs throughout her work consistently. The various Standlines and Standpoints series take the central metaphor of her practice — where you stand morally, philosophically, ethically — and render it literally. One of those is an ongoing performance-based piece: wherever she is, she places a circle of silk string on the ground, steps inside it, and photographs herself. The gesture is simple. Its accumulation over years becomes a kind of durational map of displacement — every location where she paused long enough to mark it. In the series of drawings Standpunkte und Standlinie (2011) and Standlinie P 1-8 (2018), position lines remain constant while others disappear, at times entirely; new lines, obscure and marked with uncertainty, emerge while others are firm and pronounced. Standpoints sit steadily, float, or are about to leave the page.

"My drawings reflect a personal, subjective understanding of my place in the world."

Leaving the Ego at the Door

For more than a decade, Götzmann has been part of NightLadder, a Brisbane-based collective of five artists who meet every Friday to make work collaboratively, primarily in the form of artist books. Their approach runs counter to the individualism that shapes much of the contemporary art world.

In one of their early artist book series, The Anarchist Notebooks (2014), their process is both simple and radical: each artist begins working — drawing, collaging, printing — into a pre-used, partially filled notebook, then passes it on. The next artist responds directly to what is already there, extending it, and at times even obscuring it partly or entirely. A page is only considered complete when all five members agree.

"You have to leave your ego at the door."

No mark is too precious to be overwritten; no gesture is protected. The process depends on a shared willingness to relinquish ownership, grounded in mutual trust.

NightLadder maintains a steady, unhurried rhythm, mounting an exhibition every two years. Over time, their work has taken on varied forms: small, repurposed railway notebooks sourced from a deceased worker's estate; 100 × 70 cm large-scale mixed media drawings assembled as wall pieces; manipulated postcards; or chalk-based notebooks with a strong emphasis on collage. Not every experiment succeeds, and Götzmann is candid about the projects that fall short. But this openness — to failure as much as discovery — is central to the group's longevity. Process, rather than outcome, remains the guiding principle.

Implicit in this way of working is a critique of the broader art system. Where the market privileges singular authorship, recognisable style, and commercial clarity, NightLadder operates otherwise: through collective authorship, shared vision, and works that resist attribution to any single hand. That the collective has endured for so long is, in itself, a quiet but persuasive argument for another way of making art.

Making It Together

The discussion that followed Götzmann's presentation moved into territory that the group returns to often: how to maintain a serious practice in a media environment that demands constant output. The algorithm requires volume; deep work requires time. The two are not easily reconciled.

The VSG group itself was named as a possible ground for this kind of practice — a place to show work in progress regularly, to build the habit of making work visible before it is finished or resolved. Not a performance of completion, but a practice of showing up with what you have.

This article is based on a presentation and discussion from a Virtual Studio Groups session on 19 April 2026.

Fifteen artists. Fifteen relationships with water. The breadth of that relationship is what strikes you first as you move through the space.

Seb Bradshaw's hanging lantern sculpture — its panels studded with hundreds of pale shells, its interior lit from within in luminous green — feels at once ancient and alive. It glows the way bioluminescent water glows: unsettling and beautiful in equal measure. The shells are water's deposits, accumulated slowly by time and tide. Bradshaw has made a reliquary of them.

On the adjacent wall, Yann Courte's photographs are arranged not in a grid but in a loosely clustered mosaic — images of shore, wave, and figure at the edge of the sea. There is a contemplative quality to the selection: someone standing alone where the land ends; close-up studies of sand and driftwood; the foamy edge of a wave retreating. These are images of attention, of someone watching water carefully.

Nearby, a set of small specimen frames arranged on a shelf holds sea-found objects — sea glass, pebbles, shells, fragments of net and weed — each displayed with the care of a natural history cabinet. Something about the scale of these works (intimate, almost private) next to Bradshaw's large illuminated sculpture creates an interesting tension between the monumental and the miniature.

Three framed collage works hang in sequence, layering photographic imagery with paint and mixed media. Figures appear to stand in or emerge from water, surrounded by colour fields of deep orange and blue. The exhibition's text, written by Seb Bradshaw, is mounted on the wall alongside a pair of headphones — an audio work, a collaborative piece between Bosko Begovic and River Reishi, that accompanies a bowl of sand placed on a table below. This meditative interactive installation invites visitors to take a moment in time, breathing while interacting with fine white sand from Valencia beach, while listening to the poem.

In the window display, landscape works hang pinned to a teal wall, visible from the street — an invitation rather than a boundary.

The show ran through 28 February. The Water Calls To Us is curated from within the VSG community, with exhibition text by Seb Bradshaw (@artbyseb138).

Participating artists:
Bosko Begovic · Gordana Žikić · Sarah-Jane Mason · Kai Rennes · Patricia Chow · Raymond Watson · Ylva Eklöf · Theresa Wilshusen · Anna Likhina · Åsa Ekman · Louise Norström · Cassandra Stubbington · River Reishi · Seb Bradshaw · Yann Courte

One side is a dragon. The other is a shark. Both are made from cloth, shells, embroidery, hair, feathers, found fragments. The shell holes are ones I found that way — holes already there, already made by the sea. I just strung them. They make a sound when you move.

I started making it during my residency at La Escocesa in Barcelona in 2019, as part of a research project about cultural identity, mythology, and tradition in contemporary life. But it was also, very honestly, about fear. My fear of deep water. My fear of what lives below the surface.

The dragon comes from a split tradition. In Slavic and Catalan mythology, the dragon is a creature of fire, rain, fertility — it connects sky, water, and earth. In Serbian mythology specifically, there are two kinds of dragon: as, the good one associated with rain and immortality, and ala, the bad one that brings storms and ruins crops. This distinction — a creature that can be both protector and destroyer depending on its nature — felt true to something. In Western Christian tradition, dragons are always evil, always to be slain. I was more interested in the version that could be either.

The shark I chose because it is my specific fear. The shadow beneath the surface. The thing my imagination magnifies into danger even when the water is shallow.

The headdress covers the eyes on purpose. It is a shamanic mask. In shamanic journeys, you are not looking outward — you are looking inward. The idea was: I do not need to see. I am seeing with other eyes.

The performance at the beach came after months of research — drawing sharks, learning which species live in the Mediterranean, writing letters to the sharks while sitting in a golden corner in my studio made from emergency blankets, a projector hanging above, video playing on salt spread across the floor. I drew protective symbols on my body in black crayon. I used sage and feathers. And then, fully dressed, wearing the headdress, I entered the water.

The question from the VSG group that stayed with me afterward was not about fear. It was about process. The mask is a finished object — a work on its own. But the investigation of my relationship with water is not finished. I am still taking photos from the same pier in Barcelona, one specific view from above without the horizon. I have been doing this for ten years, and the technology keeps changing — the phones change, the apps change, the filters change — and the photos change with them, and the paintings change with them. Each year the water looks different because the light is different and because I am different.

Someone in the meeting said: what if you made another series of drawings now? To see how the fear has changed?

I got the idea while we were talking: I could make paintings from the abstract drawings — not more literal water paintings, but paintings that come from that darker, less controlled place. Let the fear stay in its form and see what it looks like on canvas.

I don't think the fear is cured. I go a little deeper into the sea than I used to. I understand the sharks better. I have read what they are, where they are, what they are doing. Knowledge changes fear — not by eliminating it but by changing its shape.

The work keeps going. That is the most honest thing I can say about it.

Exhibition reflection for Virtual Studio Groups / Digital Art Magazine
Photos © Gordana Žikić
Text: exhibition reflection by Gordana Žikić

Text reference used for editorial and educational purposes from Moderna Museet, Stockholm, "Britta Marakatt-Labba: Where Each Stitch Breathes," exhibition description (2025)

The exhibition Where Each Stitch Breathes by Britta Marakatt-Labba made a very strong impression on me. Her approach to materials and the precision of her work resonated deeply with some of my own artistic concerns, especially my use of textile, embroidery, and drawing. The exhibition explores the relation between material, gesture, and narrative in a way that felt both conceptually and emotionally close to my own practice.

Marakatt-Labba was born in Idivuoma, Sápmi, and has been creating work that reflects on Sámi life, culture, and history for almost five decades. Her pieces range from small embroidered scenes to large-scale installations and graphic works. The monumental 24-meter-long embroidery Historjá (2003–2007) is the central work of the exhibition. It unfolds as a continuous visual narrative of Sámi history and worldview, often compared to the Bayeux Tapestry for its scale and detail.

The exhibition highlights how Marakatt-Labba transforms the whiteness of the fabric into an active element of the composition. The unstitched surface often represents snow or light, yet it is never an empty space — it becomes part of the drawing, a rhythm that allows the embroidered figures to breathe. This careful balance between presence and absence creates a visual tension that draws you in and holds you.

What struck me most was the way she uses thread as line, as if she were drawing directly onto the fabric. Her figures — reindeer, people, boats, birds — are rendered with an economy of means that belies the extraordinary density of meaning behind each image. The works are simultaneously folk art and contemporary art, accessible and deeply layered.

Her use of duodji — the traditional Sámi craft practice — as a conceptual and political framework is also significant. She does not separate craft from art, or tradition from contemporaneity. The work insists that these distinctions are false, or at least unhelpful.

I came away thinking about the politics of material: what it means to choose a medium that has historically been dismissed as 'women's work' or 'craft', and to make from it a body of work that demands the full attention of the contemporary art world. Marakatt-Labba has done this without compromise, across five decades.

For any artist working with textile, drawing, or questions of cultural identity and narrative — this exhibition is essential.

To see more about this exhibition on the official website of Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Juan Antonio Cerezuela is the artist selected for the exchange program between @homesessionbcn and @belgrade_artist_in_residence with the support of Institut Ramon Llull.

Juan Antonio Cerezuela (Cartagena, 1982) is a visual artist based in Barcelona. He has exhibited his works in Barcelona in centres such as Born CCM, Arts Santa Mònica, or Fabra i Coats. Some of his solo exhibitions are en horas bajas (La Espronceda), Blanco y ceniza (13ESPACIOarte), La memoria ignífuga (Fundación Gabarrón) and Full Blanks (CEART). Since 2018, Cerezuela develops his work in the art centre La Escocesa.

In his work, the correlation between language, time and space is usually present through installation, performance and site specific works. In them, elements and issues such as silence, invisibility or illegibility are constantly repeated to bring to light different tensions.

www.juanantoniocerezuela.com

Can I quit being an Artist?

I started asking myself this question, moved by some mixed feelings, wondering if there are other ways of being — or not — in art. In fact, my first proposal in response was to use the production budget of the Homesession and Belgrade Exchange program to process my cessation as an artist.

However, the answer to this question started to raise many other questions which confronted me with some contradictions, driving me to a dead end. I needed to escape, to move position…

I needed to move…

During my first days in Belgrade, an idea came to my mind while I was walking through the city and I found some basketball courts in the way. I wanted to play basketball, and I wanted to look for a personal trajectory within the city that allowed me to play. Then, and with the help of residents and friends from Belgrade, I found basketball courts and playgrounds across the city.

One of the things that strike me here in Belgrade is the fact that these courts — as well as playgrounds — are very visible, well-maintained and generously spread across the city. I don't know if this abundance has to do with some kind of cultural or sporting tradition, or maybe with the fact that Yugoslavia hosted the 1970 Basketball World Cup, but what strikes me most is how present, how democratic and how public these spaces are.

To translate this research into an artistic work, I decided to visit as many courts as I could during my residency, and have a basketball play session on each of them. After that, for each court, I decided to produce a score based on the plays, to generate a map of the city through these sessions, and to record some videos and photos.

Text 1 — by Mark Fish

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Text 2 — by Mark Fish

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Text 3 — by Mark Fish

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Click here for portfolio

Elena Greta Falcini was one of the participants in the Virtual Artist in Residence program in February and March 2022. Belgrade Artist in Residence.

The Room of Absence

'Being in one's shoes' is literally the catch. Strange shoes, more like footprints in an alien matter. Then there is the formula of that matter and the image of IT. It is odd how in an attempt of assuming literal, which is the same as being literal, the horizon was breached and the view expended into the microscopic and symbolic realm. So, we have a NO-ONE in his shoes, an image of nothing, or rather the interpretation of the gaze of the electron and the latter stand in for it, the formula. There is the image, shoes and letters for what there isn't — the subject and its strange object.

Like the stuff 'the dreams are made off' — nothing — this room is filled with fiction — an impetus to assume.

There is something, though, and it's not in the room and that something is matter. Which is a weird way to phrase it and even weirder decision to end the sentence like that. Nevertheless, the right way. For, it is matter. For anyone who dares to attach simplicity to such an endeavor, and achievement, let first the same one try to just simply think the subject. Well, one can't, but what one can recommend to such one is to appraise that matter for that is the closest one can and will ever get to the subject. Subject is in the other room missing — filling the ABSENCE — and in here we have the stand in for it — the alien matter. Alien, not because of some unruly connotation, but because matter is by default strange — an alien recourse to our fictions.

There was something to be said, by the subject-missing, and that something was: "Material in its autonomy". Which is also an odd statement, because, what material stands in its autonomy?! Well, this is the ONE, that one that stands (out). It is very difficult for a material to stand autonomously, given that material is, by default, in-a-relation to something. Well, this material, these shoes in this room, are standing (out) in this room, almost autonomously — for there is no subject to pair them to. But, there is a formula for that matter, and formula is a kind of thought, so the thought is there — in the image, in the formula, in the shoes — but the subject is not.

There is a room. There is an absence. And there is matter — standing in.

Text by Mark Fish

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See the original exhibition at uniarte.org

Juxtapose website · Instagram

In June 2025, Virtual Studio Groups participated in Juxtapose — held at Godsbanen, a former train station and cultural centre in Aarhus, Denmark, and we showed alongside 22 other artist-run projects from across Europe and beyond.

About Juxtapose

Juxtapose was founded in 2018 by co-directors Cecilie Bernts and Pamela Grombacher with the specific intention of creating a space for artist-run projects that were being excluded from commercial fairs. As Pamela explained to VSG members during a live Zoom walkthrough of the fair, the name itself says it all: to juxtapose is to place different things side by side so you can better understand and appreciate the differences between them.

"We don't have a theme. Instead, we just try to show as many different kinds of artist-run projects as we can." — Pamela Grombacher, Co-Director, Juxtapose

Juxtapose takes place in the Rå Hal — the Raw Hall — of Godsbanen, a vast former goods-unloading room in the old train station. Rather than standard white-wall booths, exhibitors are given a set of precision-cut wooden modules — interlocking boards that can be assembled like a puzzle without power tools, year after year, to build whatever structure fits the project. Some exhibitors use them; some don't. That freedom is part of the concept.

This year Juxtapose also officially dropped the word "art fair" from its identity — a deliberate move, both to shed commercial associations and to open up what the event can be. There are now year-round public and professional programmes developing alongside the annual event, all aimed at supporting artist-run initiatives.

The range of projects on show was extraordinary: an artist-run school on a farm in Colchester; a space that began in Damascus and has been based in Stockholm for ten years; an outdoor ceramic studio; a photography newspaper from Norway; a queer itinerant space from Uppsala; a performance collective doing a live news studio; architects who used no modules and responded directly to the building's architecture instead. And VSG — an online community of artists, presenting a physical wall of dreams.

Watch the Tour

During the fair, Pamela Grombacher gave VSG members a live Zoom walkthrough of the entire exhibition — booth by booth, project by project. The recording is embedded above.

Our Exhibition: Dreams

What image could represent a dream? A flicker of light, a blurred memory, a symbolic object, or a sudden feeling without name?

Dreams invited VSG artists to respond to this question through a single image, printed in Instax Square format and displayed collectively on one wall. Each photograph stands alone — a glimpse into one artist's interior landscape — yet together they form a shared constellation of poetic fragments.

We asked each participant to send one digital image. It could be a photo of an artwork, a photograph taken spontaneously, a still life or object, something symbolic, abstract, or deeply personal. The limitation of the format — one image, one small square — became part of the creative process. This is both a collective work and an archive of individual visions. A wall of dreams.

How can dream narratives become photographs? This question hovered behind every image: not to be answered, but followed. In a dream, logic loosens and things transform. These images, too, resist strict interpretation — some reveal, some conceal, all invite the viewer into a layered space between memory, fiction, and emotion.

Participating Artists

Twenty-one VSG members contributed an image to the collective wall:

Gordana Zikic · Bosko Begovic · Theresa Wilshusen · Ilija Dincic · Raymond Watson · Cassandra Stubbington · Ylva Eklöf · Paula Elion · Predrag Damjanovic · Elena Greta Falcini · Kai Rennes · Juan David Gallindo · Juan Antonio Cerezuela · Juan Pablo Meneses · Katarina Rasic · Zey Öztaşdelen · Genevieve Leavold · Åsa Ekman · Seb Bradshaw · River Reishi · Rosie Hearne

A Visual Dialogue: Theresa Wilshusen & Gordana Zikic

Among the VSG participants, two artists — Theresa Wilshusen and Gordana Zikic — brought more than a single Instax print to the exhibition. Each had developed a more extended body of work around the Dreams theme, and their individual approaches, while distinct, entered into an unexpected dialogue at the fair.

Both work with collage as a method — layering digital iPad drawing over photographic images to build a visual language that sits between documentation and invention. The result in each case is imagery that feels simultaneously grounded and displaced: the logic of dreams made visible through a specific, recognisable hand.

Theresa Wilshusen's series layers white line drawings over landscape photographs — hands, stones, water, geological forms — building images that feel like memories of places half-remembered. Each work holds a physical specificity (a particular rock, a particular coastline) that dissolves under the drawn lines into something more interior. The series has its own coherence as a body of work: a sustained visual investigation of how the material world appears when seen from inside a dream.

Gordana Zikic's work operates in a similar register but with a different charge: figures, feet, shoes placed into open water, the body navigating a landscape that feels uncertain beneath it. Where Wilshusen's imagery tends toward the elemental and geological, Zikic's carries a sense of movement and contingency — standing somewhere you might not stay. Together their works formed a quiet conversation within the larger collective wall: two different visual languages finding a shared grammar in the collage of drawing over photography — each one distinct, each one recognisably part of the same question.

In April 2025, Virtual Studio Groups (VSG) participated in SUPERMARKET – Stockholm Independent Art Fair, one of the leading international platforms for artist-run initiatives. The fair brings together independent, non-profit spaces from around the world, making it a natural fit for a community like VSG.

For a group that lives and works across borders and time zones, the question of how to exhibit was as much part of the concept as the works themselves. Rather than shipping original artworks across countries, the booth was built around prints — a practical and economical solution that also gave the presentation a unified quality. Within that framework, individual voices still came through. Several members sent gypsum casts of their hands, arranged on the table as a quiet, tactile installation — a trace of the body, distributed across geography. Gordana Žikić showed a headdress from one of her performances alongside her prints. Åsa Ekman and Kai Rennes each brought a sculpture, adding dimension and presence to the space.

Exhibiting members: Gordana Žikić · Boško Begović · Theresa Wilshusen · Ilija Dinčić · Rosie Hearne · River Reishi · Kai Rennes · Sabine Wedege · Cassandra Stubbington · Raymond Watson · Predrag Damjanović · Åsa Ekman

Alongside the booth, VSG hosted one of its regular community meetings — part of the ongoing series organized by Stuart Mayers — with an added dimension: guests from SUPERMARKET were invited to join in person and experience how the group actually works. Some VSG members were on-site in Stockholm (Gordana, Kai, Åsa, and Paula), while others connected from their studios around the world. It was a genuinely hybrid gathering, and a rare opportunity for the international art fair community to look inside a virtual artist community in action — not just the finished work on the walls, but the living conversation behind it.