GRAZ.- Photography has a lot to do with orientation. To obtain a good picture, one should position oneself at a suitable angle to the desired motif. The rays of light must also be oriented by lenses when they enter the camera. They set the direction by means of the light passing through them, and redirect the “pencils of light” in such a way that they make pictures emerge. The camera itself provides orientation as well. As a gravitational point, it ensures that all the objects photographed refer to and are put in relation to it.

A similarly strong force of attraction can radiate from a light- house as well. As a marker of land—as a landmark—it is able to align everything toward or repel everything from itself, even if it is currently not within the range of vision. Cyclic Indirec­ tions (2022) by Luzie Meyer is a video with a twofold, perhaps even threefold or fourfold, circular movement, at whose center stands the Simon Loschen Lighthouse in Bremerhaven, the oldest mainland lighthouse on the North Sea coast. The camera circles around the protagonist, who, equipped with a headlamp, climbs the lighthouse on a spiral staircase and by doing so imitates its now extinguished beacon light. Meanwhile, the voice- over circles around orientation relationships and, alternating between English and German, gets caught in translation errors. The tower is central to the video as a point of orientation and simultaneously causes dizziness. The body and the architecture, the body and the camera, the camera and the light, the light and the architecture—all of this is situated in a performative, circular approach. The picture becomes ever brighter and flickers, the dramatic quality of the music, which was composed using audio recordings from inside the building, intensifies, as if the video were rebelling against the verticality of the architecture on an acoustic and visual level. Cyclic Indirections challenges the de- commissioned lighthouse, but does not confront it as an individual antagonist, but rather its symbolic rectilinearity by means of a multiplicity of intermeshing lines of orientation.

Rectilinearity is perhaps, however, no longer the priority of the traveler, and she prefers the dark forest. Some repetitions are perhaps necessary until one recognizes that the only way out of a circle leads through it.2

The lighthouse becomes a proxy for an understanding of orientation that has been inscribed deeply in our thinking. It believes in the objectively shortest route, unconditionally puts itself at the service of reachability, and works on an ever more precise transposition of land into two-dimensional maps, which declare “previously untouched nature” to territories that can be owned. And just as lighthouses and geographical maps structure the spatial axis, clocks structure the temporal axis. Their uniform rhythm spans the world and is laid over the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, ensuring the ability to plan shipping routes on a global level and to quantify work. A prominent building in Graz connects the axes of space and time with one another: The clocktower stands on the Schloßberg in Graz, with a five-meter large clockface mounted on each of its sides. The first of them was affixed in 1569, and is part of a development in which the measuring of time was decoupled from the church and standardized. The clocktower embodies the Western-European temporal and spatial exploitation of the world that determines our cultural and economic tempo.

As an intervention in the visual axis between Camera Austria and the Clocktower in Graz, Luzie Meyer produced a rudimentary lens. When gazing through a small opening in a transparent, slightly darkened adhesive film on the east window of the exhibition space from a specific perspective, the landmark is brought into the center of view.

Her gaze fixed on the sundial in the gable, which due to a lack of sun showed no hour, or all hours, while fatalistically presenting its motto: Umbra sumus.

We are shadows
shadows
shadows
shadows

Okay, the sentence now sounds extremely ominous. But what is it actually supposed to mean? That we, even when blood still pumps through our veins with a hot pulse, are already shadows? Or that those who came before us are always still present as shadows? Or simply that the hours flit across the face of a clock like shadows? Or perhaps that indeed time itself is the shadow of something that we are unable to see? Of the bodies of decisions that people have made over the centuries, the acts that they performed or neglected?3

While the gigantic hands of the clocktower continually remind us that right now, in this moment, time is passing, the clicking of the slide projector in Marietta Mavrokordatou’s installation follows its own rhythm. The pace at which the slides change, however, is not uniform. Like three old clocks, the projectors run at their own speed. Contact microphones record the sounds made by the devices, transmit them to several loudspeakers, and acoustically project their mechanics into the entire exhibition space.

The three-channel slide projection shows details of pictures of a room that appear for a brief moment and then disappear again. The camera meanders around between the living room furniture exclusively from floor level, as if from the perspective of a child who has laid down under a piece of furniture. The camera comes so close to the legs of the table and sofa, the parquet flooring, spiderwebs, and specks of dust as if drawn to them. Between black-and-white photographs appear pictures in color, in which a kneeling person seems to be searching for an undefined something under the furniture. The alternation between black-and- white and color seems to follow an almost cinematic logic: It not only implies a story on different temporal levels, the steady increase of color pictures in the mass of black-and-white photographs suggesting a narrative that, however, falls apart again and again in the endless loop of the slide carousel.

The title of the work, GIRL (2024), calls to mind the stage of youth and of becoming an adult, the physical or mental return to a familiar place, feelings of yearning, uncertainty, and restlessness. The appearance and disappearance of scenes before our inner eye suggest fragmented memory pictures from childhood externalized with the aid of the camera, as the body has long since outgrown such memories. The picture of a chair leg, which can be just as momentous as the taste of Proust’s madeleine and sud- denly contains within it an entire life.

As Sara Ahmed describes in her examination of phenomenology, not only landmarks, but also nondescript spaces and everyday furnishings contribute to a feeling of orientation and situate us in relation to our surroundings. “Orientations, then, are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places. bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but, rather, are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling.”4 The body that we observe in GIRL as it orients itself toward the floor nonetheless seems as if it were to become visible and emerge from the diffuse light exactly for this reason, precisely because it deviates from the lines specified by the room. “Indeed, for bodies to arrive in spaces where they are not already at home, where they are not ‘in place,’ involves hard work; Having arrived, such bodies in turn might acquire new shapes. And spaces in turn acquire new bodies.”

2:00, 5:00, 8:00, 12:00, and 21:00 (2024) show accumulations of dried-out contact lenses that have been left lying on a nightstand, that have collected dust over time and become relicts of an earlier life. By photographing the lenses at close range with a macro lens, Mavrokordatou re-performs her own way of seeing, in which she, without aids like contact lenses, enters into intimate contact with the concrete environment. As permeable discs, contact lenses mark the threshold between the constellations of the material world and the projection of them on the inner wall of our retina, as well as the further cognitive and emotional internalization of these visual impressions. After being used, the lenses become brittle objects. Rather than light being redirected unobtrusively, it is now refracted and reflected by them, becomes diffuse and distorted, and is molded into unruly light sculptures.

Two framed prints from Irena Haiduk’s series Memory Im­ plants (since 2019) tend in particular to reflect light. On a thin layer of wax applied to the surface of the pictures, light is refracted and impedes visibility. The works are components of a multipart scenography: A mirror-object guides sunlight to the pictures, the wall is painted a lustrous metallic color, and the exhibition space is dimmed. The entire arrangement of the darkened space, targeted lighting, and background calls to mind a filmset. But rather than offering ideal conditions for ravenous viewing or grasping the works photographically, it produces visual interference. Eyes eventually adjust and the body gradually finds a position to capture the images.

The pictures that are central to this staging were produced for Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner (1982). In them, robots called replicants set off on a search for their cre- ator. They want to persuade him to extend their lifespan and are simultaneously being pursued by a detective. The replicants resemble human beings physically, cognitively, and emotionally and can be identified only with the help of a machine analysis of their pupil.

In the photographs appropriated by Haiduk, one sees puzzling interiors: A convex mirror in which an entire room can be recognized forms the center of the first picture. The second shows a multiple enlargement of this mirror, in which the replicant Zohra can be viewed sleeping. Both pictures come from slide films that Irena Haiduk acquired at an auction of film props in 2008. On the date given in the film for the death of each of the replicants depicted, Haiduk destroyed the films, with only one print of each picture produced as a single edition. As a result of the limited reproduction possibilities and the prints’ sensitivity to light, the pictures can exist as physical objects for an only limited period of time.

With this work, Irena Haiduk highlights a central moment in Blade Runner that remains nearly unnoticed: The film narrative takes place in a society in which photographs and memories are manipulated in order to make it easier to control replicants yearning for their own history. Photographs thus facilitate control, consequently give rise to uncertainty, and are nonetheless an emotional anchor in a dystopian world. The photographs exhibited were, however, were produced by the replicants themselves and are thus examples of the rare original and authentic memory pictures that appear in the film. With them, the replicants document their own life with remarkable compositional and referential precision and produce pictures of themselves.

Irena Haiduk accords the prints an impermanence. The Mem­ory Implants series thus testifies to her profound skepticism vis- à-vis the Western-characterized obsession with pictures, the desire to possess them, their permanent availability and ability to be reproduced ad infinitum. In Haiduk’s artistic practice, darkness becomes a camera—in the original sense, from the Latin “camera” for room, chamber—where objects accumulate and become compressed over time, where the dominance of vision is reduced and distinctions or classifications become obscure. The Memory Implants follow a similar principle. They are insepa- rably connected with the logic of the underlying film and make the boundaries between fiction, representation, memory, and reality blur. As material surrogates for fictional beings, they embody their memories and themselves become memory implants in the viewers—as such, they carry the image forward, outward, and when the photographs are gone, pass from memory into oral images.

ST: In the brain, light is separated unequally from dark. At the onset of darkness, our eyes become more sensitive during the first few minutes. Do you know what happens when we find ourselves in a place deprived of light, or when we close our eyes? What is the darkness that we see when our eyes are closed, like now?

MILAN: Can you just tell me if you have any experience in the theater?

ST: The absence of light activates a series of peripheral cells in the retina called “off cells.” When activated, these cells produce the particular kind of vision that we call darkness. Darkness is not an absence of light, or non-vision. It is the result of the activity of the “off-cells,” a product of our own retina. Darkness.6

The darkening of the space arises from Irena Haiduk’s installation and extends throughout the entire exhibition. The light engenders an intense atmospheric picture and challenges habits of seeing. Repeatedly failing to align with light emphasizes the exhibition space itself as a viewing apparatus: The darkening employed allows daylight to permeate solely through a small cutout, through which the incoming light is bundled and the gaze focused toward the outside. Reflections of the window frames as well as the tinted indirect light reflected by the façades of the buildings opposite washes into the space and brings the outside inside. In the continuous movement of the time of day and planetary constellations, the light is never the same and thus evokes time passing by.

The title of the exhibition, Repeatedly failing to align with light, which is borrowed from Luzie Meyer’s film, describes a position that is expressed in all of the works exhibited: As a fundamental condition of photography, light also determines its limits, since it must be brought under control in order to produce photographic pictures. But rather than being restrained, the light in the exhibition becomes a protagonist itself, is given solid form, and appears as a disruptive factor. By contrast with the enthusiasm of the beginnings of photography, it is meanwhile undisputed that even a perfect lens is unable to depict an absolute truth. Ultimately, everything and everyone will fail to align with light, since light, by contrast with everything else, does not age.

1 Sir David Brewster (attributed), “Photogenic Drawing, or Drawing by the Agency of Art,” Edinburgh Review 86, no. 154 (January 1843), pp. 317–18.
2 Luzie Meyer, based loosely on Dante Alighieri and René Descartes, Cyclic Indirections, 2022.
3 Mithu Sanyal, Antichristie (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2024), pp. 61–62.
4 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 8–9.
5 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 62.
6 Irena Haiduk and Blakey Bessire, NULA (screenplay), 2025, pp. 77–78.

Leon Hösl and Magdalena Stöger