Family Stories at Hangar

The family album unfolds in the exhibition, curated by Gabriela Torres Freyermuth, through seven projects that reveal the artists’ own family stories.

Overview

Unlike the anonymous photographers of The House – the exhibition by Lee Shulman / The Anonymous Project, presented on the ground floor –, these committed photographic artists find inspiration among their loved ones to create and to develop personal projects. These photographic series - most of them staged - unveil the intimate sphere of the family, moving beyond a purely documentary approach. The photographers explore universal themes such as motherhood, family ties, grief, and reconciliation.

Photography not only functions as a medium for capturing everyday family moments; here, it becomes a gateway to unexpected purposes: healing, depicting hidden stories, and revealing emotional bonds.

Some artists use the camera in a therapeutic way to rebuild connections with the past and to include those who were excluded from family narratives. Others transform loss into forms of acceptance or turn the act of farewell into a ritual that makes separation from loved ones bearable. This approach echoes the words of artist Deanna Dikeman: “We never know which time will be the last time we see someone.”

Others, instead, reveal stories that remain on the margins of public discourse: the lives of women constrained by social traditions, the complexities of bicultural couples related to language, migration, and love, as well as intimate experiences surrounding motherhood.

These narratives, sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, take us from the personal to the universal. Here, photography does not merely preserve the people we cherish; it also allows us to confront what memory tends to hide, forget, or reinvent.