Collecting the photographic – current and future practices

A conversation about artistic practices and their life beyond storage and data servers in museum institutions.

Viktoria Binschtok, digital semiotics (HUG), 2024 - Courtesy Klemm's

Clare Strand is a UK-based artist who works with, but mostly against the photographic medium. Over the past 25 yrs, she has made work with found imagery, kinetic machinery, web programmes, fairground attractions and most recently, large-scale paintings and chamber music. She often rejects the default settings of the photographic medium and instead and without apology, welcomes a subtle, slow-burn, approach. Her practice is situated somewhere between control and a willful acceptance of chance.

Strand has exhibited in venues such as The Museum Folkwang; The Center Pompidou; Tate Britain; Salzburg Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work is held in the collections of MOMA; SFMoma; The V&A Museum; The Center Pompidou; The Kunstmuseum, Bonn; The British Council; The McEvoy Collection; The Arts Council; The NY Public Library; The Provincial Collection,  The Uni Credit Bank; The Mead Museum: Cornell University, The Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf andThe DZ Bank.

Strand has produced 4 publications to date, including Clare Strand Monograph published by Steidl (2009), Skirts published by GOST (2014) Girl Plays with Snake published by MACK (2017) and Negatives for Fun with Clare Strand Photography published by Multipress (2019). Strand was one of the four nominees for the Deutsche Borse prize ( 2020). She is currently represented by Parrotta Contemporary Art, Cologne/Bonn.

Born in 1984, lives and works in Paris. Her work is informed by extensive research into historical media, such as alternative photographic techniques. Her works produce situations in which truth and fiction, historical facts and contemporary assumptions are intertwined. Her major exhibitions include Nineteenth-Century Photography Now (Getty Museum, 2024), desire to see (Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, 2022), Photography to the test of abstraction (FRAC Normandie Rouen, 2020), From Here to There (Japan Society, New York, 2020), CONCEPTION (Rencontres d'Arles, 2019). 

Nadine Wietlisbach (*1982) has been Director of the Fotomuseum Winterthur since 2018. Together with an interdisciplinary team she devises exhibitions, publications and other discursive formats in the fields of contemporary photography and art.

Nadine was previously director of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, curator at the Nidwaldner Museum in Stans and founded the independent art space sic! Raum für Kunst in Lucerne. She is interested in how cultural institutions can question and shape socio-political concerns both programmatically and transversally from within.