With Carolinë Heider, Ruth Horak, Lisa Rastl, Claudia Rohrauer (AT),  Alessia Olivieri, Christelle Boulé, Corinne Futterlieb (CH)

Opening, Saturday 9 September 5 pm / Exhibition tour with the artists: Sunday 10 September 11 am /  Supported by Österreichisches Kulturforum Bern & Pro Helvetia.

Can you gender photo technology? Yes! With the ongoing exhibition series, the persistently male-connotated photo technology is given a female counterpart: FOTOTECHNIKA. For this purpose, the four initiators Carolinë Heider, Ruth Horak, Lisa Rastl, and Claudia Rohrauer from Austria invite three female artists from Switzerland to deal with the production conditions of photography or, more specifically, with the topic of „phototechnics“, and not only to apply them practically, but to understand them as an artistic pictorial motif: Alessia Olivieri, Christelle Boulé and Corinne Futterlieb.

For the artists who come together at Photoforum in Biel/Bienne, photographic or image processing techniques are not only a self-evident necessity in their everyday professional lives as artists, teachers, or laboratory assistants, but photographic technology is for them the occasion for countless experiments and accordingly also the motif in their artistic works. Because: who loves his medium, fathoms its essence, and understands its technique. What images are created when photographic technology is the motif? When Corinne Futterlieb recovers silver from spent fixing baths and builds her own system for it? When Alessia Olivieri uses an electron microscope to penetrate deep into analog negative material, when Claudia Rohrauer provokes the photographic grain of black-and-white films until it overlays what is depicted and becomes a motif itself, or when Lisa Rastl demonstratively duplicates the act of reproduction? How can Christelle Boulé transfer something into images that is not visible? And what unambiguous gender attributions does Carolinë Heider find in manuals on photography that are still aimed at a predominantly male readership today?

Most of the works are created especially for the exhibition, in particular the self-portraits of the female artists (a continuation of Group Picture with Ladies and Cameras), in which they quite humorously merge their technical affinities with their own person, play with camera tripods, feed an AI, or clean the laboratory equipment at the end of the day.

• „The lab taught me to look behind the material.“ (Corinne Futterlieb)
• „Synesthesia is an attempt to create a new link between the senses of sight and smell.“ (Christelle Boulé)
• „I wanted to see what happens at the heart of the photosensitive photo emulsion.“ (Alessia Olivieri)
• „The fault line between technique and content is the photographic most personal.“ (Claudia Rohrauer)
• „The strict constraints of reproduction and object photography provoke me to take them literally.“ (Lisa Rastl)
• „Vaseline, stockings or screen apertures – softly drawn light stands for beauty and femininity“ (Carolinë Heider)
• „Prompt writing is the new photo technique so that AIs can generate images from texts.“ (Ruth Horak)

The initiators of the exhibition series Carolinë Heider, Ruth Horak, Lisa Rastl, and Claudia Rohrauer have been working together since 2019 and repeatedly invite guest artists who understand photography as a space for thinking and take apparatuses, image processes, materials, specialist literature, etc. as the starting point for their artistic work. The exhibition in Biel/Bienne is the fifth part of an ongoing series, two publications have been produced so far: FOTOTECHNIKA and Fotografie as Motif, the latter awarded with two medals for most beautiful books. See also: https://www.fotografie-als-motiv.com/