Book launch Antje Guenther

On Sunday 12 June from 15:00 to 17:00, TENT hosts a book presentation of What if a counter proof makes any proof an illusion? This photography book by the artist Antje Guenther explores how aesthetic impulses and the desire to prove continue to influence the development of theories and hypotheses. In conversation with the collector and former museum director Reyn van der Lugt, Guenther will discuss her work’s context and the book’s realisation. The publication includes an accompanying text, ‘AMALGAM’, by the writer, translator, and visual artist Miek Zwamborn, from which Zwamborn will read at this event.

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Guenther’s publication combines her urban photography of Barcelona, Glasgow, and Osaka with reproductions of Wilson Bentley’s photographs of snow crystals. Bentley was one of the first photographers of snow Crystals to observe their uniqueness. Text fragments regarding questions about beauty in science, Bentley’s body of ideas, and supersymmetry – a still popular set of theories in particle physics – are interspersed throughout the book with what at first appear to be unrelated pictures. Instead of approaching photography as a medium historically used (and abused) to elicit evidence, Guenther employs it as a means to provoke questions about photography’s status.

Antje Guenther completed her graduate studies in Photography and Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe in 2013 and completed a year-long residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2016. She considers speculating and claims of proof as essential techniques in the questioning of the possibilities and general conditions of (scientific) knowledge and the underlying narratives and power structures of knowledge production. Guenther’s background in medicine informs her physical approach to the materialisation of theoretical problems.