Meeting — May 3, 2026: Supermarket & Joachim Froese
Supermarket Art Fair — Context and Personal Experiences
What Supermarket is (Stuart): Europe's longest-running independent artist-run fair, this year celebrating 20 years. The 2025 edition had 63 exhibitors from 42 countries. Selection tries to include at least one participant from every country that applies.
Two ways to attend:
- With a booth — for exhibiting artist-run organisations
- Meeting Expanded programme — for artists and curators attached to artist-run organisations, without a booth (9 people this year on this track)
Stuart runs the internal networking programme: thematic meetings of 1 hour each, 6–12 people, over the first three days — jumping-off points for discussions and potential collaborations. Social programme includes an opening party Wednesday, a Forum where the local Stockholm art scene meets booth representatives, and a closing party Saturday.
Sarah: Attended without a booth, focused entirely on meetings. Finds booth management too physically and energetically demanding — having to be "on" constantly, repeating the same things. Her practice is about relationships and collaboration, so the meetings format suits her better. She and Stuart essentially camped in the meeting room — quieter, structured, and you get to substance quickly without the awkward booth-introduction phase. Previously had a booth at Juxtapose, which was good for artists showing work but exhausting personally.
Kai: Attended both Supermarket and Market (the commercial fair running simultaneously) on the same day. Found Market more boring — high quality, big names, but a conventional gallery experience. Supermarket more engaging and fun, with more interesting work.
Supermarket vs. Market — The Two Worlds
Market is private commercial galleries focused on sales. Major institutions and private collectors attend to acquire. Acquisition curators from major museums go to Market; junior curators from places like Moderna Museet might attend Supermarket to get a feel for the scene, but acquisition decisions happen at Market.
At major commercial fairs like Frieze in London, some galleries bring a team of 10 people and change their entire booth overnight to show multiple artists across the run — a completely different scale from a group of artists travelling from another country.
Market crowd: champagne, coaches from posh hotels, BMW cars on offer — visibly a different world. Mostly Scandinavian and Nordic galleries, plus Germany and a few from the UK.
Guest Presentation: Joachim Froese
Photographer and academic based between Brisbane and Berlin. Originally from Germany, grew up in Canada, moved to Australia in 1991. Teaching is very central to his identity. Currently on residency in Valencia with his partner Mara.
Read the full article: When the Image Disappears — On Photography, Memory, and the Art of Being Ready
Photography, death, and memory: Books have been written on the connection between photography and death — everything photographed is in some sense frozen and killed. One of the first uses of photography was to photograph the dead. When a photograph physically disappears, as in his Mars work, that connection between photography and mortality is made literal and visible.
Gotza connected this to shamanic ideas about time — that time is a spiral in which all moments exist simultaneously rather than linearly disappearing. Photography, from this perspective, doesn't capture something gone but makes present something that always exists. Joachim responded that this entire concept of visual memory only exists because of photography — roughly 100 years old. Before photography, people had stories and documents but not images of their own lives.
Mars and the power of images: He argued that Elon Musk's ability to convince people to consider going to Mars depends entirely on photographic images — Mars looks walkable, even earthly, in NASA photographs. Without those images, nobody would enter the rocket. Photography creates belief in things that are actually impossible or dangerous. The group connected this to "landscape porn" — consuming photographic landscapes creates a desire to visit entirely disconnected from the reality of a place.
On memory and selection: When choosing photographs to remember someone by, we always select images that reflect how we want to remember them — his mother in her 30s, when she filled his universe — not when she looked annoyed or tired. Photography shows how we want to look at people, not who they fully are.
AI and environmental concerns: He uses Firefly (Photoshop) because it generates print-resolution files — ChatGPT's image outputs are too small for print. He has fundamental concerns about AI at scale, primarily environmental: the energy consumption is enormous, comparable to Bitcoin. He referenced Google considering small nuclear power stations for data centres.
Historical processes — practical notes:
- Salt printing doesn't require a proper darkroom — just a room with no UV light (ordinary incandescent bulbs are fine)
- Cyanotype is an easier entry point and can be toned to black using green tea, red wine, or coffee
- DIY UV exposure box: a cardboard moving box, two holes in the top, two 100-watt UV bulbs (the type used in nail studios). Gives ~20-minute exposure times
- Turmeric printing: vodka as solvent, two spoons of turmeric, filtered, coated onto paper, exposed with a positive image in strong sunlight. UV bleaches out the turmeric where light hits
- Museums apply a strict 3-month display / 3-year dark storage rule for works on paper at no more than 50 lux — avoiding direct sun and framing under glass gives reasonable stability at home
On professional practice: His website holds everything going back to 1993. He photographs exhibitions as soon as they are hung, before the opening, and puts documentation on his website while the show is still running. He resisted Instagram for years and believes that reluctance affected his visibility. His Instagram now functions partly as a blog on the history of photography.
Post quality over quantity — weekly or every two weeks is enough. Posting every day with minor fragments is noise. The discipline is curating what you publish, not filling space.
The slide story: Before email and digital files, he always kept a ready set of slides. A curator building an Australian photography exhibition emailed him on a Thursday asking for images. He sent slides by next-day delivery. The curator had them Friday. Two of the other five artists replied a week later, two more the following Tuesday. He got into the show — not only because the work was good, but because he was prepared when an opportunity appeared.
From Gotza: VSG could use its weekly meetings to practice small, time-limited presentations of work in progress — forcing members to document and reflect on what they're making week to week. Teresa agreed this should happen more often.
This summary was generated from a session transcript using AI. Some details of who said what may be inaccurate, as speaker attribution was not always clear from the transcript.