Rethinking Photography: Presence/Absence, Visible/Invisible

Location: Ratskeller Exhibition space (rue du Curé)

Following Rethinking Nature in 2021 and Rethinking Identity in 2023, this tenth edition of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg is continuing the cycle in 2025 under the all-inclusive title of Rethinking Photography. Taking as its point of departure the interrogations of the previous editions, this third chapter of the trilogy marks a new stage in thinking about the medium, its meaning and its essence as photography.

In an era flooded - if not polluted - by a constant stream of visual information, much of it of questionable authenticity, this renewed engagement with photographic imagery aligns with both artistic inquiry and social critique. Amid concerns over "fake news" and the increasing use of AI to generate images, some photographers are developing new ways to present and circulate their work - either by resisting technology or by repurposing and deconstructing it.

The history of photography offers countless examples of images exploring the very notion of presence or absence. Every image inherently points to what lies substantially outside the frame, beyond time, beyond space. Today, as the sheer volume of images grows exponentially, emerging visual anthropology offers fresh ways of seeing, revealing hidden, latent, or otherwise invisible realities.

Luxembourg-based artist Yann Annicchiarico, explores worlds that seem visually inaccessible through his photographs and installations. By redefining our relationship with space and time, he challenges the scale of objects, revealing new sensitive ways of seeing. Using a scanner placed at ground level, he “photographs” the nocturnal world of insects, bringing fleeting, marginal existences into focus - lives often overlooked by human-centered perspectives. Here, the photographic image becomes a record of both the visible and the invisible, of presence and absence.

On a different level, Belgian artist Lucas Leffler’s multimedia art engages repeatedly with the ontological aspects of the image. As a visual artist and photographer, he revisits photographic history and techniques while critically examining the industrial legacy of major companies like Agfa and Kodak. By creating his own photosensitive emulsions from silver-rich sludge found in polluted waterways, he addresses the ecological impact of the photography industry while rethinking the practice in a digital age.

Through the appropriation and alteration of archived photographs, Paulo Simão explores themes of presence and absence, visibility and erasure in a historical and political context. His series Erased draws inspiration from Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing., reworking images from the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress - specifically, photographs of statues depicting influential historical figures, some of whom are now the subject of controversy. By removing these figures from the images, Simão highlights an “absence” that is historically charged, questioning representations of power, public monuments, and the role of the artist in contemporary society.

The concept of Erasure takes on a more destructive dimension in Embers of Narratives (سرديات الجمر) by German-Iraqi artist Raisan Hameed, who is expanding on themes of destruction from his earlier cycles Risse and ZerStörung, in a more abstract manner. Using images from Google Street View of his hometown, Mosul, he manipulates them with a thermographic tool that mimics the traces of fire - evoking the war-torn landscapes of his childhood. This experimental, hands-on process, combined with thermal printing, produces dark, abstracted surfaces, partially obscuring the original image. Hameed’s work is a profound meditation on memory and the fragility of visual narratives.

A narrative woven with poetic imagery is a recurring element in Marco Godinho’s conceptual art, an artist of Luxembourg-Portuguese origins. In some works, he employs lenticular photography to create multidimensional spaces, where the viewer’s position generates new images and activates shifting temporalities.

In Blind Memory (The Eyes of the Tiger), a double portrait of Jorge Luis Borges based on a 1969 photograph by Eduardo Comesaña, Godinho - always relying on the audience’s positioning - triggers an additional new image at the intersection with the former one, a shadowy third eye - an allusion to Borges’ fascination with time, symbolized in his work by the figure of the tiger.

In the work The Hidden Library, Godinho, playing with the notions of the visible and invisible, “invites us to continue the experience of physical and mental displacement, where absence and presence, distance and proximity, help us translate the intimate and poetic value of a photograph into a collective and political aesthetic value.”

He explains:

"Through a most subtle and delicate gesture (termed “inframince” by Marcel Duchamp), travel and research photographs are hidden within the InfoLab of Casino Luxembourg, transformed into bookmarks, as each image steps beyond the frame, becoming a temporal and spatial marker of my creative process."

This close relationship with the viewer - whose encounter with the installation allows for an ever-repeating resurgence of meaning - can be seen in different forms throughout all of Godinho’s other works which challenge the limits of the photographic image while opening new avenues for perception and interpretation.

Exhibition opening

Thursday 24 April 2025 at 18:00

Free entrance, without registration

Free guided tour every Saturday

26.04 at 15:00 (FR)

03.05 at 15:00 (EN)

10.05 at 15:00 (LU/DE)

17.05 at 15:00 (FR)

24.05 at 15:00 (EN)

31.05 at 15:00 (LU/DE)

07.06 at 15:00 (FR)

14.06 at 15:00 (EN)

21.06 at 15:00 (LU/DE)

Curatorial tour by Paul di Felice

28.06.2025 à 15:00 (FR)

Free entrance, without registration

Organisation: Cercle Cité and Café-Crème

Curator: Paul di Felice (Café-Crème)

Artists: Yann Annicchiarico, Marco Godinho, Raisan Hameed, Lucas Leffler, Paulo Simão

More information on cerclecite.lu