SENSING MATTER: FROM THE INFRA-THIN TO THE PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECT
curated by Duncan Wooldridge
07.11.2025 - 25.01.2026
The exhibition includes work by eleven artists: Kristine Krauze-Slucka, Reinis Lismanis, Agata Madejska, Suzanne Mooney, Hanako Murakami, Juuso Noronkoski, Xanath Ramo, Alnis Stakle, Eva Stenram, Ryudai Takano, and Laure Winants.
Sensing Matter presents a selection of works examining photographic materiality and objecthood. The exhibition asks a simple question – at what point might a photograph become visible as a thing? – and develops from it a study in perception and encounter. Moving from barely visible vapours and light sensitivities – which might not appear as images at all – towards sculpture and installation, which seem to take the photograph away from the wall to encroach into physical space. The exhibition studies the matter and gestures of the photographic image, many of which are usually hidden out of view. Spanning moments of invention and production, to the transformations and afterlives of images, the exhibition brings into view subtle qualities and characteristics that photographs, in their familiarity, usually conceal: an apparition-like sense of possibility, and an ongoing potential found in the residue.
As photography remains pulled between the extremes of a supposedly weightless transmissibility and a presence that is often associated with nostalgia or redundancy, a central proposition of the exhibition is to think the photographic through Marcel Duchamp’s notes on the infra-thin: a subtle but sensitive communicative frequency which hovers on the threshold of perceptibility. In their experiments with what a photograph can do or be, the works in the exhibition test the parameters of a familiar medium. They move from record to catalyst, from historicity to possibility. In so doing they invoke many Duchampian motifs: vapours and gases, shadows and refractions, doubles, chance and accident.
Curatorial Essay
At one moment an image might appear transparent, like a window; at another, it might appear opaque, a solid thing. If you hold a photograph in your hand, it will bend and torque, twist and fold. If you use the camera against its programming, it will produce a different image, unexpected or perhaps unreadable (at least at first). Within the fine slivers of photographic technologies and their materials, which we usually perceive to be immaterial, are spaces and images that challenge our understanding of photography. Between the poles of transparency and opacity, there are spaces in which the photograph is both an image and an object - no longer simply one or the other – a space with a sudden richness and complexity. This space could be called the in-between, but we might also call it the infra-thin.
The artist Marcel Duchamp described the infra-thin (inframince) as a world of subtly available signals and channels of communication, usually overlooked, to which we might become attuned. Sharing many qualities with photography, the infra-thin may be hard to pin down, but it can be understood through specific examples given by Duchamp: the warmth of a seat (which has just been left); the whistling sound of velvet trousers; or the difference in dimensions between two mass-produced objects from the same mould. Each are subtle, like the difference between a photograph and the world it depicts. As Marjorie Perloff suggests, the infra-thin is sometimes a study of differences in a world of similarities. But it is also a study of frequencies and sensitivities, and photography’s sensitivities – beyond its capacity to reproduce the appearance of the world - are frequently overlooked at the expense of its convenience. Photography’s materiality is elusive, but full of information. It shares much in common with Duchamp’s description of the infra-thin, if only we can become attuned.
Photography’s materiality usually appears both to come out of the ether (in its chemical and digital processes), and to exist as a stubborn objecthood when the image has aged significantly or is no longer of use. It appears as a series of apparitions, only to disappear before returning as a series of residues and remainders. These two ideas, apparition and residue, become starting points for orienting the work in the exhibition space. Some speak to the moment of an image’s production, whilst others work with already existing material to find as yet unexamined details or overlooked possibilities.
As the exhibition begins, subtle and oblique transformations establish a key principle for thinking about the photographic image in an expanded manner: is photography a medium of representation, or a technology of sensitivities? In Hanako Murakami’s Air de l’image, the artist recreates the scent of one of the earliest photographic developers, which used lavender and other plant materials to develop and make images. Juuso Noronkoski’s An Ode To Absent Minds flickers between a source of light and a shadow or representation, speaking to an encounter where light and image are changed by their meeting; Laure Winants’ studies of refractions in arctic ice reveal dense layers of information, visually polychromic, contained in the frozen water and trapped gas; Agata Madejska’s Technocomplex fuses photo-sensitive pigment to pewter, developing a dynamic material sensitive to changing conditions of light which can be affected by bodies and objects. Ryudai Takano’s studies of hands and their gestures cross a range of imaging technologies, seeking contact and exchange, approaching but always modifying reality in each instance.
Eva Stenram describes the thresholds of the image as object: Limin is a handheld scan of a doorway in the artist’s apartment, bending space into new forms in a work that is both detailed and yet also atmospherically charged; in Per Pulverem ad Astra, Stenram again brings the spectacular images of the faraway surface of Mars into dialogue with the domestic. Made as a series of negatives, the NASA images were left on the artist’s apartment floor to gather dust before being printed.
As our perception of the image begins to expand, the image begins to take up increasing volumes of space. Kristine Krauze-Slucka’s assemblage maps the shifting contours and contested territories of a series of borderlands: transformed by their movement and use, they fold and unfurl away from the wall. Suzanne Mooney’s studies of optical devices expand into space: a broken lens ruptures our spatial experience by drawing attention to a fusion of image and surface, whilst a series of hanging glass discs function as lenses transforming the space and surrounding works. Reinis Lismanis’ works are made by collecting the remaining inks from the bottom of commercial print cartridges. Sprayed onto the surface of photo paper by the artist, operating as a human image maker or printer, the industrial logics of the artist’s practice move beyond the wall as rolls on the gallery wall and a series of shelving racks. Xanath Ramos’ Problematica del Espacio shows a series of pop-up photo- sculptures made by the artist which divert the traffic of vehicles in the streets of Mexico City, whilst Alnis Stakle’s work performs a physical and conceptual splitting of the image: a negative separated into its layers by the artist becomes a landscape that is re-materialised as both a wall-clinging vinyl, and as a framed print, overlaid in a performance of photography’s multiplicities.
As the materiality of the image becomes ever more tangible to us, a series of new possible photographies might also begin to be imagined. A renewed sensory encounter with the matter of our images expands our capacity to touch, and be touched, to sense and to make sense: this photographic manifestation of infra-thin, which echoes Duchamp’s own concerns with shadows, vapours, gas, and heat; pointing, dust, boundaries and shifts in perspective; mass production and accident, and above all the multiple, resists the simplification of an image which simultaneously gets us closer to the world at the same time as opening up an infinite array of new ways to see.