Ecologies of Visibility II

In 1986, Sigmar Polke transformed the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into an experimental image environment in which color pigments, photosensitive substances, and climatic conditions interacted. Under the title Athanor, he brought alchemical ideas of an active nature into dialogue with photographic and painterly processes: light, heat, humidity, and chemical reactions became forces that generated images.

Forty years later, a two-day program at C/O Berlin takes Polke’s Biennale pavilion as its point of departure to consider the continuing relevance of this experimental framework. How does our understanding of images change when the processes that produce them are shaped by environmental conditions? What does it mean to see images as carriers of ecological change, technological intervention, and persistent contamination?

The program is part of Sigmar Polke. Athanor NOW, an international research and education project of the Anna Polke Foundation, and also forms part of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize, presented by C/O Berlin and the Crespo Foundation. In her exhibition, prizewinner Susanne Kriemann reflects on another fortieth anniversary—the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986—by examining the afterlives of toxic residues and radioactive materials, as well as the traces they leave in landscapes, bodies, and images.

Over the course of one evening and one afternoon, artists, curators, and scholars will come together in conversation. Taking Polke’s experimental system and its connections among hermeticism, photography, chemistry, and material research as their starting point, they will consider how images emerge when material transformation, rather than representation, comes to the fore; when visibility results from processes that themselves remain invisible; and when artistic practice follows the material instead of imposing a predetermined form on it.

The program was initiated by Hans-Christian von Herrmann (TU Berlin, Department of Literary Studies) and Katja Müller-Helle (HU Berlin, “Das Technische Bild” research center).

Program

Sat, Sep 26, 2026

15:00–15:30
Welcome 
Katja Müller-Helle, HU Berlin /
Katharina Täschner, C/O Berlin
Language German

15:30–17:00
Anti-Photography
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Artist  /
Florian Ebner, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Language Englisch

17:30–19:00
The Unpredictable
Via Lewandowsky, Artist /
Peter Geimer, Art historian, German Center for Art History Paris
Language German

Katja Müller-Helle is a scholar of art and media studies. She heads the research group The Technical Image at both the Institute for Art and Visual History and the Centre for Cultural Technology at Humboldt University of Berlin. She has been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Her research focuses on digital image cultures and image censorship, the history and theory of photography and visual evidence.

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili is a Georgian-American photographer based in Berlin. Her work embraces the slippery nature of photography, conceiving the medium as an ongoing process of developing and revealing. Recent solo exhibitions include Sammlung at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2026), making food out of sunlight at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2025), there, but not at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2025), and Verkleidung at Kunsthalle Basel (2023).

Florian Ebner, photographer and art historian, has been Head of the Photography Collection at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou since 2017. Previously, he served as Curator of the Photography Collection at Museum Folkwang in Essen and, in 2015, curated the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His work focuses on modern photography, photography since the 1970s, and contemporary photography. Most recently, he co-curated Hito Steyerl. I Will Survive. Physical and Virtual Spaces (2021) with Marcella Lista, Allemagne / Années 1920 / Nouvelle Objectivité / August Sander (2022) with Angela Lampe, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us (2025).

Via Lewandowsky is a German artist who works with a wide variety of media, including photography, performance, painting, drawing, object art and installation. In addition to participating in documenta 9 and numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, he has become best known for his exhibition productions on scientific themes, his site-specific interventions and art-in-architecture projects.

Peter Geimer is an art historian and visual studies scholar. His research focuses on photography as a practice situated between scientific experimentation and modern visual culture. After holding academic positions in Zurich and Bielefeld, he has been a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Freie Universität Berlin since 2010 (currently on leave) and director of the German Forum for Art History in Paris since 2022.