VIENNA.- How do you capture the inner life of a person whose reality no longer aligns with the outer world? And how do you remain in relation to someone who is both intimately familiar and irreversibly changing?
Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her mother, Antonette Berger, became increasingly unwell and the artist became her primary caretaker. It took several months in a time of anxiety and isolation until Berger was diagnosed with LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), a form of dementia. Hubbard has described this diagnosis as both necessary and insufficient: a gesture towards control and classification that ultimately fails to grasp the lived, shifting reality of her mother’s condition. It is precisely this gap that the project inhabits.
At its centre is Berger’s first-floor apartment in a Victorian house she owned for over forty years, which becomes the stage for an evolving series of photographic encounters. The images emerge from different rituals and register a reciprocity in which grief and tenderness, disorientation and intimacy coexist. The camera here is not simply a recording device but a structuring presence – it creates pauses within the routines of care, carving out time that is not governed by necessity, while simultaneously acting as witness to small performances.
The Great Room marks a significant shift in Hubbard’s practice, as her identities as artist and daughter become fundamentally entangled. Having largely avoided photographing people in her work, she turns here towards the most personal of subjects. Yet her longstanding critical engagement with representation and the power structures embedded in photography remains dispositive. In many of the images, Hubbard includes herself – often with tripod and camera – insisting on the presence of the apparatus and her own positionality. This gesture resists the fiction of an invisible observer. It renders transparent the act of image-making, but also reads as an ethical act: a refusal to leave her mother alone within the frame. As the artist explains in her interview with Bettina Spörr in the accompanying publication:
“I am quite protective of my mom. I never wanted someone to have the experience of looking at an image of my mom and mistakenly positioning themself in my place simply because they are seeing her from a place where I once stood with my camera. I was intuitively positioning myself so I was visible within the photographs via the mirrors that were hung in the house.”
In some instances, Berger herself presses the shutter. This subtle shift unsettles photography’s conventional subject–object relation. The image becomes a site where agency is redistributed rather than withdrawn. Berger, despite the stigmas attached to ageing and cognitive decline, appears as an active participant. Or, in the artist’s own words:
“As a counternarrative, I was interested in creating photographs in which my mom is visibly the photographer. I wanted to offer her all the power that is assumed by the camera operator. This fictional narrative of Antonette the photographer runs through the whole project, and it is essentially about establishing respect for my mom above everything else.”
On the formal level, the photographs are marked by instability: oblique angles, fragmented perspectives, and kaleidoscopic reflections in mirrors. These visual strategies do not simply illustrate confusion or disorientation. Rather, they dismantle the authority of a single, stable viewpoint. The mirror, in this context, becomes more than a symbol of self-awareness or mortality; it foregrounds the act of seeing itself as contingent and mediated. Images proliferate, overlap, and resist coherence – suggesting that perception, like memory, is always in flux.
This exploration is extended in Hubbard’s cameraless works. In a series of darkroom sessions, she and her mother created contact prints using their own bodies. Covered in Vaseline, which acted as a resist in the developing process, they pressed themselves directly onto photographic paper. The resulting works are immediate and indexical, operating at a one-to-one scale. They translate touch into image, collapsing the distance between body and representation. The process itself – deliberate, physically demanding, almost choreographic – foregrounds the body as a tool of inscription rather than something to be depicted. This way, intimacy is not represented but materially enacted.
The title The Great Room refers to the apartment’s largest and once most representative space. Its former grandeur has faded, its surfaces bearing the traces of time and neglect. Berger divided the room with a provisional wall, separating her sleeping area from a space that functioned as storage – a site where objects and unresolved matters accumulated. The ‘greatness’ of the room thus figures as both memory and fiction, pointing to a disjunction between past and present, appearance and lived reality.
This motif of division also recurs in the exhibition. Temporary walls structure the gallery in reference to the apartment’s layout while providing support for the photographs. Architecture here does not merely display the work; it extends its logic. What emerges is not a fixed portrait but a shifting constellation: a house, a life, and a relationship in transition – held together, however precariously, through acts of looking, touching, and being together.
Katherine Hubbard was born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1981 and lives between Stone Ridge, NY, USA, and New York, USA.
Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Bettina Spörr
