6 ½ Weeks – Walentynowicz Lauritsen

Dorota Walentynowicz and Nanna Krogh Lauritsen disrupt the paradigm that maintains that photographs precisely reproduce whatever crosses the path of the camera. Both artists fabricate their own pinhole cameras and use their work to explore the opposing poles of exterior and interior worlds in photography. The Museum Folkwang is showing 20 works by these two artists in the central foyer of the museum.

Dorota Walentynowicz builds her pinhole cameras from materials such as cardboard and wood, allowing light to enter from various angles. The cameras capture movements in selected spaces and record them on a folded negative. In the prints, the traces of these creases are clearly visible, competing with the actual image of the exterior world.

Nanna Krogh Lauritsen also approaches the world of her subject matter by way of her own handmade cameras. Some consist of wooden boxes with multiple apertures, which after the development of the direct positive paper exhibit not images, but circles of varying brightness which crystallise into constellations. Others are made out of the photographic paper itself, which is folded so as to simultaneously function as camera and image surface. The result – in a way a kind of selfie – resembles an interrogation of the camera itself as a device.

Dorota Walentynowicz (born 1977 in Gdańsk, Poland) studied at the University of Arts in Posen and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She works at the intersections of photography, video, installation and performance, and has received various grants and awards, including from the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and the Huygens Scholarship Programme in the Netherlands.

Nanna Krogh Lauritsen (born 1984 in Holstebro, Denmark) studied photography in Copenhagen, Glasgow, Gothenburg and Leicester. In her artistic practice, she interrogates the possibilities of photographic paper to produce images without cameras. Her works have been shown in various exhibitions in Denmark and Sweden.

On Friday, 26 January 2018 at 6:30 p.m. the show Walentynowicz – Lauritsen: Outside In – Inside Out will kick off with an artist’s talk and a concert-performance, featuring Dorota and Małgorzata Walentynowicz, followed by DJ Simon Hildebrandt on the decks.
Admission is free.

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