Marius Glauer and Anna Breit at Francisco Carolinum Linz

Through their distinct visual languages, these exhibitions invite us to consider photography not merely as a record, but as a dynamic space where past and present converge.

Overview

Both Marius Glauer’s Wait A Minute and Anna Breit’s These Days I Think A Lot About The Days That I Forgot delve into the intricate relationship between photography, memory, and the passage of time. While their approaches differ, both artists utilize the photographic medium to explore how images capture, distort, and reconstruct our understanding of temporality.

Wait A Minute by Marius Glauer

A shell found on the beach. Splashes of water between it and our gaze. The shell's surface, its grooves, reveal its age. The past time becomes a phenomenon of the surface. In the work of Marius Glauer, it is this resonant relationship between surface, materiality and temporality that can be described as the artist's central interest. The medium in which the artist works, photography, has always had a particularly complex relationship to the concept of surface. In the era of analog film, it was still the light-sensitive place where images were recorded, but the contemporary media landscape is characterized by countless new digital surfaces on which images show themselves to us and come into contact with one another.

Curated by Susanne Watzenboeck, Wait A Minute, Glauer's first institutional exhibition in Austria, challenges us to pause for a moment and focus the camera against the backdrop of these dizzying imagery. What image of temporality can photography create today? In response to this question, Marius Glauer shows us shiny, opulent surfaces that reflect images from art history and pop culture. He shows sensual liveliness in lifeless objects, visual tensions of materialities from 'high' and 'low' aesthetics, but above all he shows the manifold forms that photography can currently take. In a wide variety of display situations he allows photography to resonate with ideas from sculpture, installation and fashion. The material from which Glauer's photographs are made is permeable - artistic signatures, eras, forms and dates overlap, adapt to their surroundings and tell of the plural perspectives that photography can take on reality. Glauer approaches questions about the representation of temporality in the photographic image with a fusional and boundary-breaking attitude. Processuality becomes more important than finality. But maybe a final form is just a flash-like snapshot?

These Days I Think A Lot About The Days That I Forgot by Anna Breit

Anna Breit is a photographer whose work is at the interface between documentary, applied and artistic photography. Her working method is characterized by a profound examination of interpersonal relationships, which she captures with a precise eye and great sensitivity. She often places people from her immediate environment at the center of her works, creating an intimate reflection on closeness, identity and connection. As part of her extensive exhibition curated by Maria Venzl at the Francisco Carolinum, Anna Breit presents a multi-layered photographic work that can be read as a portrait of three women and generations: her grandmother, her mother and herself. Starting from her own childhood, the artist explores the conscious creation and reflection of memories. Using photography, she creates new moments with her mother that are not only lived, but preserved as images seemingly for eternity. A particular focus is on gestures and textiles - these play a central role in her family. Textiles can be found in the life of both her grandmother and her mother, who worked as a seamstress and made clothes in her own workshop.

In These Days I Think A Lot About The Days That I Forgot, Anna Breit combines archive photos from family albums with newly created, analogue images, blurring the boundaries between past and present. Her work becomes a touching photographic love letter to her mother and grandmother, raising questions about transience, mortality and the meaning of memories. The result is an intimate homage in which present and past, archive material and new photographs are inextricably intertwined - a poetic echo that resonates both in the lived moment and in the images.