COLOGNE.- Every two years, the Internationale Photoszene Köln organizes research residencies that allow artists to explore photographic archives and collections in Cologne. The Artist Meets Archive program highlights the complexity of archives as a source of artistic inspiration and creation. The results will be exhibited across various venues in the city, starting May 17, 2025. Alongside Museum Ludwig, participating institutions for the fourth edition of Artist Meets Archive include Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Dombauarchiv Köln, the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, and Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum.
At Museum Ludwig, artist Pauline Hafsia M’barek (b. 1979, based in Brussels and Cologne) unveils a new project inspired by photographs from the Agfa advertising archive, which the museum acquired in 2005. Agfa, a German chemical company, was among the world’s leading producers of photographic film and lab equipment for many decades. M’barek’s research explores the fragility of photographic materials, focusing on their chemical and physical composition, the conditions of their production, and the challenges of preservation.
A photograph is more than just a medium of visualization and representation—it possesses a vibrant materiality and plays an active role in conservational, economic, and political processes, often intertwined with (neo)colonial structures. Analog photographs are composed of both organic materials, such as cellulose and gelatin, and inorganic elements like glass, silver, or copper, forming complex, multilayered surfaces. Over time, these light-sensitive materials bear traces of the recording process and the conditions that shaped them.
This awareness led M’barek to examine the vulnerability of photographic archives and the challenges of exhibiting them, as their long-term preservation depends on protection from external influences. Conservation efforts, in essence, are attempts to manage the uncontrollable— negotiating the inevitable transformations of material over time.
Photographs continuously react to their surroundings, responding to changes in temperature, humidity, pollutants, and microorganisms. Over time, they are prone to silvering, fading, brittleness, and mold. On a molecular level, chemical processes remain in motion, as all material is inherently entropic. Yet, decay and deterioration do more than signal loss—they open up new possibilities for interpretation and meaning. This evolving transformation is at the center of the exhibition Entropic Records, where the artist explores the shifting nature of photographic material over time.
M’barek’s immersive work at Museum Ludwig weaves together photographs of the Agfa- production, toxic documents, and microscopic material analyses with her exploration of the museum’s biotope, creating a speculative multimedia experience. Through dazzling light phenomena, shimmering microstructures, ticking measuring instruments and crawling insects, she creates a space shaped by the tension between preservation and decay, order and entropy. The installation approaches an elusive visuality that repeatedly slips away and remains precarious.
Pauline Hafsia M’barek studied visual art in Hamburg, Marseille, and Cologne. In her practice, the body and its perceptual systems serve as both instruments and subjects of investigation. By approaching her subject as closely as possible, she exposes herself to precarious and unstable moments between observation and experience. Her videos, photographs, installations, and performative lectures emerge from an open, experimental process—not as finalized works, but as transitory stages of an artistic research in movement.
Curator: Barbara Engelbach
Consultant curator: Miriam Szwast
