The Grain of the Voice

An exhibition by 19 students from the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany, ranging from photography and experimental media to performance art.

Outcome of Wiebke's annual Lectureship at Essen for the Integration of Theory and Practice (April 2008-March 2009).

Asked to consider Roland Barthes' 1972 essay 'The Grain of Voice' as a leitmotif in the production of works that consider photography as performative. How the photographer becomes involved in an active engagement with the question of what a photographic voice can be and how it can relate to ideas of authorship in the making of and the thinking about photography.

Questions in the process of producing the work included: Who is speaking? And who is looking? What is the character of the author? Is there an element of fictional self portraiture? What kind of timbre does a visual voice have? What do we imagine off frame? Attempting to find a gesture in the making of the work that reached out to the viewer.

Colin Penno, Felix Gienger, Linda Nau, Sander Uitdehaag, Christoph Esser, Oha Ben Shimon, Sabrina Neef, Philip Ullrich, Anne Lochmann, Anna-Lena Michel, Dorothee Kletzsch, Katrin Reinike, Ute Klein, Magdalena Bitniok, Valerie Schmidt, Johanna Kopp, Carolin Ebbert, Stephanie Ebbert, Philipp Gallon.

Catalogue: 'The Grain of the Voice' (2009), 40 pages, unpaginated, with introductory text, 2009, 5000 copies given out as part of exhibition.
Course: The Impossibility of Neutrality; Fotografie nach dem Tod des Autoren (2008/09, 2 semesters).
Subject: Integration of theory and practice / artistic research.