After Images
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
Imagine a time after photography. Unimaginable, but already not so far away, when there is plenty of reason not to add more pictures to those we have stockpiled thus far. You can find them in dusty corners, in temperature-controlled storage units, in overheated data servers, and in the collective subconscious. Photographs make “what once was” stay with us: it is why they can ring so true and lie so convincingly.
Repeatedly failing to align with light at Camera Austria signals how bold proposals and imagination might be the way out of the (hi)story of photography as we know it. Curated by Leon Hösl and Magdalena Stöger, the show features the work of Irena Haiduk, Marietta Mavrokordatou, and Luzie Meye, each of whom approaches the source of photography—light—differently: as a guide; withholding it; and translating it into sound.
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
Illuminated exclusively by natural light, with the blinds almost fully down, the exhibition space in Graz is drawn into a self-contained world of its own. Depending on the weather and time of day, sunlight is filtered in as thin, muted lines and patches. It is present not only as a visual aid pointing to the works but also as a tool to complicate simple readings, intervening and transforming into an opponent of vision.
Irena Haiduk’s directions anchor the exhibition in this darkness, setting the stage for a cascade of effects generated by Helios (2021): an inox, sundial-like “daylight carrier” refracting what little natural light enters the room onto a metallic-painted wall. There, two of her Memory Implants (2019–ongoing) are installed. The idea of the implant refers to the surrogate memories that the replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are led to believe are their own. Haiduk’s Memory Implants are prints from slides the artist purchased at an auction for film props. Each exists as a single edition of one, coated with wax to prevent straight-on photography; the corresponding slide is destroyed on the humanoid’s expiration date as given in the film, set in 2019. This exacting process—of replication, erasure, and timed disappearance—disentangles the photographs from conventional systems of valorization and reproduction. Exaggerating and attacking the very premise of industrial planned obsolescence, on the one hand, and artistic uniqueness on the other, the Memory Implants are risks, not bonds. Viewers and consumers, so to speak, cannot be seduced into buying the image “again,” and if they do obtain the one-off, it is an original that will eventually fade to black. Pushed into what the artist calls “oral images,” documentation photography of these works is not permitted, while the daylight carrier system (flooding light onto them exactly once a day, like a clock) erodes the images out of the regime of the visual.
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
From Haiduk’s darkened foundation comes the steady whir and click of Marietta Mavrokordatou’s slide projectors, their noise enhanced and broadcast in near real-time through a set of surround-sound speakers. The three projectors, clicking intermittently, mark time as much as they mark images, mechanical heartbeats translating vision into vibration. Not synchronized with each other (but nearly), they come with a slight delay that both annoys and announces the following slides—one by one, in changing sets of three.
Mavrokordatou’s GIRL (2023/2024) is a landscape of black-and-white close-ups of the spaces under a sofa, under chairs, and along the floor: dust, cobweb, parts of the legs and feet of a couch, interrupted now and then by the warm, sensuous gold-hued color slides of a young woman on her elbows, hands, and knees. The limbs and joints are close together, not so much in search of something that fell on the floor but instead posed as part of this interior, limited view; as if they belong there, with something else, a memory or experience that, too, remains out of reach—psychologically repressed, irretrievable, mysterious, and maybe even beautiful. Along Camera Austria’s back wall, GIRL is accompanied by a set of five framed prints, behind reflective glass, documenting worn contact lenses that are drying and accumulating dust on a nightstand in the light of what seems either sunset or sunrise; vision is made material, audible, and tactile. Each print is titled after the times of day or night (2:00; 5:00; 12:00, etc.) when they were presumably taken. The whir of the projectors and measured rotations, the layered echoes and curved, crumbling lens surfaces suggest a space of looking too close. Not just of impaired, aided vision, but also of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, repeatedly—and therefore one of looking again and again at what it means to look.
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
In Luzie Meyer’s works—a film, a series of photographs, and an intervention—vision is both ensnared and epitomized. In her video essay Cyclic Indirections (2022), the artist is followed as she makes her way up the staircase of the now-defunct Simon Loschen Lighthouse in Bremerhaven, intermittently wearing a headlamp, a torch, and a video camera. At one point, the images of this quest begin to eddy and discolor into semi-purple, red-greenish negatives in a vertigo of movement; the images are overcast with ruminations in English and German that are not exactly each other’s translations but variations and citations, referencing Dante, Montaigne, Dickinson, and the Homeric hymn of the one-eyed Cyclops blinded by “Nobody.” Photographs of the ascent are mounted against a black matte and framed in black without glass and reflection, dispersed throughout Camera Austria’s exhibition space, scanning it with the same intensity—more likely not for answers, but for questions.
Meyer’s third, site-responsive work, Clockface (2025), turns toward the clock tower on the Schlossberg. Through a circular opening in a darkened film on Camera Austria’s east window, it leaves a single, direct view, reversing the relation to the outside, the x looking out, while making it seem as if the clock is looking in.
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
The light tower and the clock tower merge into a one-eyed monster—photography itself, perhaps—with its artificial lens and its promise of (in)sight. Haiduk’s, Mavrokordatou’s, and Meyer’s apparatuses—the daylight carrier, the (artificial) contact lens, the searchlight—each suggest a way to reach for what is already slipping and disappearing from view. Tellingly, the two Memory Implants, Memory Implant (Zora Sleeping II) and Memory Implant (Mirror), are exceptions to the snapshot pictures meant to manipulate and control the replicants’ memory in Blade Runner: Haiduk’s photo works are made by and not for the replicants, arriving from a cinematic future that now lies in the past, which themselves won’t last, except in the images we retain and the stories we tell about them, half-remembered and retold. The Cyclops returns not as myth but as a mechanism: the single eye of technology that sees everything and understands nothing, unless we refract and reframe it.
Repeatedly failing to align with light replaces the wax that Ulysses’ companions put in their ears to pass the Sirens unscathed with darkness. The exhibition unfolds as the interplay of three artistic positions in proximity: one that restrains light, one that measures it through sound, and one that pursues its unpredictability. Each asserting a mode of (not-)seeing, presence, and withdrawal. The “camera”—in both its original sense (the chamber or camera obscura) and its contemporary one (image-capturing device)—of Camera Austria becomes a place where photography is both premise and problem. What can no longer be taken in without interruption is held, transformed, and reconsidered. Darkness here is active, and light is both medium and resistance.
Installation view, Repeatedly failing to align with light, Camera Austria, Graz, 2025. Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
This three-eyed camera that the exhibition conjures contains traces of gestures: the projector clicking, the diffuse, engineered play of mirrors, and the wandering beam. What remains is an afterimage, a residue of presence, stories, and analysis—detritus that we hold onto nonetheless. Photography here is not capture but endurance. Rumor, proof, memory, and fiction coexist in varying degrees of light and darkness. Repeatedly failing to align with light operates less as an accumulation of convergence of works than as a dynamic field in which light and its opposite unfold together, a site where sight is continually redeveloped.
Repeatedly failing to align with light was on view at Camera Austria from September 12th to November 9th, 2025.
