Portraits of Books, with the Backdrop of Ruins Photography as a Method for Researching History Artists Talk: Annette Kelm and Anna Voswinckel

Portraits of Books, with the Backdrop of Ruins

Photography as a Method for Researching History

Artists Talk: Annette Kelm and Anna Voswinckel

17 May 2026, 11 am – 1 pm

The discussion will be held in English.

Tickets available online>>>

Focusing on Kelm’s series Die Bücher and Travertinsäulen, Recyclingpark Neckartal, the talk explores photography as a method of inquiry into the past – one that engages with objects, surfaces and architectural remnants as carriers of historical memory. Through her images, Kelm approaches books, materials and built forms not simply as subjects, but as sites in which political histories and their afterimages persist. The conversation will reflect on how photographic strategies can reveal latent narratives embedded in things, and how the act of framing, isolating and re-presenting becomes a way of researching and rethinking history beyond linear accounts.

Annette Kelm – an artist born in 1975 in Stuttgart, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin. Annette Kelm studied at Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. She received numerous awards and prizes, among them Camera Austria Prize (2015); Preis der Nationalgalerie, Audience Award (2009); and Art Cologne Prize for Young Artists (2005). Annette Kelm’s photographic oeuvre offers a unique outlook onto the sociocultural history of the material world. The artist uses a vast array of motifs as vocabulary to address specific moments in this history, whether it is the commodification of design objects, various forms of political critique or value systems such as money and finance. Kelm’s distinctive approach to the photographic medium has made her a prominent figure of contemporary photography in Germany and worldwide.

 

Anna Voswinckel – a Berlin-based curator specialising in contemporary photography. From 2023–2024 she curated the exhibition programme at Camera Austria, Graz. In 2020 she co-directed Uneven Ground, the 10^th Fotograf Festival Prague. She is a co-founder and former art director of the international art and literature magazine Plotki – rumors from around the Bloc, published between 2000 and 2010.