Greif Alumni: Antony Cairns, Rehan Miskci and Rodrigo Valenzuela in the ‘meantime’ at Arter Istanbul

Exploring the temporal and spatial dimensions of photography

Curated by Oğuz Karakütük for Arter contemporary art museum in Istanbul, “I Need More Time” explores photography’s present-day context by positioning it as an intuitive and fluid form of expression shaped by individual perspectives. Der Greif is proud to highlight the achievements of our alumni in the group exhibition: Antony Cairns, Rehan Miskci and Rodrigo Valenzuela. In times of instantaneous digital generation, the exhibition serves as a profound meditation on the hidden temporalities of the photographic medium.

Exploring the exhibition through the eyes and sensibility of our Artistic Director Caroline von Courten, who contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue, we can argue that our cultural obsession with the "decisive instant" has obscured the labor and duration that define image-making. She introduces the concept of the ‘meantime’: a durational sense of time that encompasses the manual, chemical, and physical processes occurring after the shutter clicks: "The genesis of the image – is when light strikes... 'freezing' the instant... However, the processes that follow this initial light-insemination can take many forms and unfold over varying durations."

This is vividly seen in the ‘photochoreography’ of artists like Rodrigo Valenzuela and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs. For Valenzuela, the work is a "gesture of labor," involving the construction of studio assemblages, manual development of prints, and the handcrafted fabrication of frames. Time here is not a fraction of a second, but a cumulative history of physical effort. The exhibition reframes picture-making as what art historian Douglas Crimp called a "stratigraphic activity." Works by artists such as Dafna Talmor and Ruth van Beek exemplify this layering: slices and splices negatives create "Constructed Landscapes," in Talmor’s practice, treated as sediments of film, while van Beek engages in a physical dialogue with archival material through folding and cutting, creating a haptic temporality. Von Courten contrasts this "layered time" with modern generative AI, which she describes as an "extractive" activity rather than a stratigraphic one. In AI, "indistinguishable, vanished times precede the genesis of the generated image – and with them, any notion of meantime disappears from the now."

One of the exhibition's most radical propositions is the classification of photography as a time-based medium. Von Courten highlights that chemical photographs are in a constant state of becoming, fading, yellowing, and reacting to their environment over decades: "The analogue chemical photograph remains in a process of becoming rather than settling into a fixed state of being... its lifespan manifests itself both materially and visually." This deep time is explored by Dionne Lee, who draws a kinship between photographic processes and fossils: nature’s own self-documentation. Meanwhile, Ege Kanar bridges the digital and analogue by exposing photochemical paper to looping online videos, literally writing the passage of a musical performance into the silver emulsion.

The exhibition concludes not as a static display, but as a ‘Fuge’. Von Courten uses this German term referring both to a musical form in which one theme is re-appearing in different voices over the composition’s course and a physical gap between tiles connecting them. "Considering the exhibition 'I Need More Time' as a physical fugue... we have encountered the subject of time iterating through many different artistic voices from around the world, leaving us with a true Art of the Fugue," states von Courten. Photography is a rhythmic, layered composition of labor, chemistry, and environmental decay. By embracing both the musical sense of a recurring theme and the physical sense of a structural gap, “I Need More Time” invites us to look into the ‘meantime’: the space where the image is still becoming.

By highlighting the ‘meantime,’ Oğuz Karakütük and the participating artists invite us to reconsider our relationship with the images we consume. For more on this topic, stay tuned and check out our upcoming »Guest Room: Alejandro León Cannock & Delphine Manjard« titled “Have You Checked Your Screen Time? Forms and Logics of Excess”. Dive into Karsten Kronas’ Artist Feature for a glimpse into photography as a plastic substance resulting from layers, degradation and transformation, and read our Q&A with Aldo Iram Juárez. His work perfectly illustrates the "stratigraphic" theme. By recycling archives and physically layering prints through cutting and scanning, he embodies the "labor of the meantime", treating the photograph as a physical sediment rather than an instant capture.