FILLING THE GAPS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND PARAFICTIONAL ARCHIVES
Sunday, March 9, 2025
3 – 4:30 PM
Museum für Fotografie
Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin
Event in English
In the series « The Wooden Beaver Archive » (2022), Michael Borowski combines a mid-19th-century photographic process with AI-generated images, thus creating an archive for the undocumented history of mineral springs as sites of queer desire. In her ongoing project « The Seven Circuits of a Pearl » (started in 2020), Ioanna Sakellaraki reconstructs an archive that unveils hidden aspects of her own family history. Blending fact and fiction, both artists apply imagination to document silenced histories through dreamlike imagery. Join our artist talk to delve into the place of imagination in archives and reflect on the evidential and reparative functions of the photographic image.
About Michael Borowski
Michael Borowski is an artist living and working in occupied Tutelo/Moneton land (Blacksburg, Virginia). He works with an expanded photographic practice to critically engage with architecture, technology, and the environment. Construction and fabrication are recurring metaphors in his work, which inhabits an ambiguous space between truth and fiction. Borowski approaches the built environment as a kind of fiction in order to show that design is not neutral, but reflects political values, personal biases, and desires. His work has been exhibited at the Soho Photo Gallery (NY), Site:Brooklyn (NY), The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CO), Candela Gallery (VA), the Prairie Center for the Arts (IL), The Czong Institute of Contemporary Art (KR), and Espace Projet (Montreal, QC). He is a 2019 recipient of a Graham Foundation grant. He received his MFA in Art and Design from the University of Michigan in 2011, and a BFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2003. Michael is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
About Ioanna Sakellaraki
Ioanna Sakellaraki is a Greek visual artist and researcher currently working between Greece and Australia. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with recent solo shows in Tokyo (JP), Melbourne (AU), Belfast (GB), Braga (PT), Greece (GR), and Berlin (DE). Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, TIME, Aesthetica, and Wallpaper, as well as in newspapers including The Guardian, Financial Times, and Deutsche Welle. Her work has entered the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was the winner of a Sony World Photography Award in 2020. She holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, an MA in Cultural Studies, and is currently completing a Ph.D. at RMIT University in Melbourne.
This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Surrender to the Dreamers, on view at the Museum für Fotografie from March 8 to April 27, 2025.
Surrender to the Dreamers is organized by analogueNOW, in cooperation with the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The exhibition and its associated events are part of the European Month of Photography 2025.
