Join us for a talk by artist Annette Kelm, who will present her research and her photographic projects.

Known for adapting, blending, and subverting the conventions of various photographic genres (still life, portraiture, landscape, and architecture photography) her works relate familiar-looking or banal subjects to forgotten histories and shifting cultural codes, and reflect on contemporary and historical roles of the photographic medium.

Kelm takes as a starting point two projects currently on display in the exhibition The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project, which respectively allude to the complex relationship between modern design and mass culture by considering photographs of textiles designed by American interior designer Dorothy Parker in the 1940s (Big Prints), and to a typology of prefabricated copper houses built in Nazi Germany and sent to Israel as part of the 1933 Haavara Agreement (Prefabricated Copper Houses, Haifa, Israel, 1933–1935). Kelm will present on her photographic practice and methodological approaches.

This talk is part of a series of events building on the studio visits organized for the exhibition The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project. It offers an opportunity to meet artists and photographers and continue to reflect on their processes and the strategies they use in constructing visual arguments, critiques, research, and observations about our built environment.

Annette Kelm lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at numerous international institutions, including ICA Milano, 2022; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2022; Museum Frieder Burda | Salon Berlin, 2020; the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, 2018; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2018; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, 2017; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, 2016; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2014; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, 2011; and KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2009; among others. In addition to her participation in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Kelm has been part of important institutional group exhibitions including Triennial for Photography and New Media, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hovikodden, Norway, 2020 and Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany, 2019. Her work has been collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and has traveled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris and New Photography, MoMA, New York among other institutions. Annette Kelm was awarded the Camera Austria Prize in 2016 and she was nominated for the AIMIA Photography Prize in 2015. Kelm’s work is represented in the permanent collections of Hamburger Kunsthalle; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.