Artists On Photography Open Call

This fellowship will be awarded annually over a period of five years commencing in 2025 to one artist and one academic.

Overview

Artists On Photography is a new initiative by the Photography Collection which seeks to enhance its historical holdings by introducing current perspectives from artists and academics in the fields of gender theory and postcolonialism.

Each year, one artist from anywhere in the world with an existing archival practice drawing on found footage and collections will receive a grant to carry out a commission. In tandem, a researcher will be invited to consider the same topic from an academic standpoint. Both will complete a research stay in Munich. The outcome will be a new work of art, a publication sharing the work created by the artist and the researcher, and an exhibition once the museum has reopened.

Practical Info

The 2025 edition explores the theme of Travel and Souvenir Albums. The cleft between the photographic objects which dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and computer-generated images which have become prominent over the past three decades has been widening in a new era defined by artificial intelligence. Yet again, photography finds itself confronted with a fresh challenge. How did earlier generations view photography? How has our understanding of the medium changed with the shift from analogue to digital photography, and now with the advent of computer-generated images? Which social practices have been introduced in an era of smartphone photography, virtual reality, and AI? Which photographic objects have drifted out of focus, disappearing into depositories? What light can those objects shed on the present day and how might we rediscover them?

Artists interested in the open call must submit an existing archive-based project as a reference, a proposal for a new work based on the Photography Collection holdings including moods to give an impression how the work could look like, and a CV including a list of exhibitions and publications.

This project allows artists to work in dialogue with a researcher on the collection’s historical holdings, using them as a starting point and source of information for a new, independent artistic project. Working with the support of a curator, they will create a new project and develop a means of presenting it in an accompanying publication. Once the museum has been reopened, their work will be exhibited alongside the historic holdings.

The selected artist will receive a project duration of one year beginning in March 2025, a €12,000 grant, a production budget of up to €10,000 for their new work, cost of travel to Munich, a publication which will showcase their new artwork, the researcher’s scholarly findings, and the historic holdings themselves. Plus, an exhibition following the reopening of the museum in 2031, the opportunity to exhibit their work in an external venue (tbc) shortly after its completion, access to one of Europe’s largest and broadest photography collections. In addition, they will get the opportunity of a collaboration on the topic with a research specialist, curatorial support for the resulting work, and public exposure in the form of the book launch following the project completion and participation in future events and talks.

About Münchner Stadtmuseum

Founded in 1888, Münchner Stadtmuseum is Germany's largest municipal museum. The Photography Museum (today the Photography Collection) was established in 1963 as an independent specialist museum and Germany's first museum dedicated solely to photography. Today, it is one of the leading institutions for photography in Europe, with holdings of over three million items including almost one million photographs. Its collection ranges from the dawn of photography in the 1840s to the present digital era, with a focus on the nineteenth century as well as the period up to and including the 1980s. A robust acquisitions program for contemporary works means that the collection holdings are steadily being expanded. Beyond photographic images, the collection also comprises roughly forty archives, gifts and bequests, and special collections and an exceptional range of technical photography equipment. The collection's unique specialized library is a trailblazer in Germany, with 25,000 volumes including books, rare volumes, and periodicals supplementing the aforementioned holdings.

From January 2024 until approximately June 2031, Münchner Stadtmuseum will undergo a €270 million comprehensive renovation in order to address urgent architectural, user, and museum needs and to become fit for the future.