photo series, medium format 6x7
analog color prints from negative, 70 x 86 cm,
mounted and framed

Installation View

In her analog photo series „Every Shade an Image,“ Katharina Gruzei creates an atmospheric imagery in which she approaches the complex topic of identity. Based on the concept of the third space by Homi K. Bhabha – who uses it to describe a place of negotiation for the diversity, dynamism, and incompleteness of identity – the artist develops photographs that function as surfaces for association and projection. The images themselves become a third space through which culture and identity can be discussed and negotiated anew. For this purpose, Katharina Gruzei takes up motifs that are explicitly related to identity and yet provide a void, so that they function as associative surfaces and convey moods that spill over onto the viewer. Identity and Culture become palpable assomething diffuse.

Katharina Gruzei uses photography to transfer the „real“ into the „symbolic“. At the same time, she creates a series in which she thematizes the medium of photography itself. Thus her title „Every Shade an Image“ refers both to the imaging light that creates the shadow in the first place, and to the imaginary space that lies hidden in the shadow; the invisible, the darkness as a blank space and void, as a place of interpretation and imagination. In her photographs she plays with „showing“ and „not showing“, thus blurring the boundary between seeing and imagining and initiating an interaction between image and the viewer.