Greif Alumni: Lilly Lulay, Marcel Top and Amin Yousefi at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf

What does photography say about belonging?

What can photography say about belonging, too? – this is the reflection at the core of “Community: Photography and Belonging” at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, curated by Linda Conze and Miriam Homer. Running until May 25, the show brings together around two-hundred-seventy works across nine thematic chapters about belonging. Its most urgent proposition reaches beyond community as a societal convention and photography as a way of documenting it. The exhibition explores belonging as a construct of the image, and with it a negotiation that unfolds both inside and outside the frame.

To move through the rooms is to peel back the layers that inform the relationships among photographer, subject, and viewer, uncovering the complexities of these dynamics. From the photographer’s responsibility in suggesting belonging or alienation, to the viewer’s role in receiving, passively or otherwise, these suggestions, these works interrogate who frames whom, and from where? And what happens when those dynamics are reversed? Navigating the fragile balance between inclusion, alienation, agency, and responsibility, the works of Greif Alumni Lilly Lulay, Marcel Top, and Amin Yousefi offer three distinct perspectives on the subject.

Lulay's installation, “How to Get in Touch,” is a study on social belonging in the digital age. Across the metal shelves’ analogue storage systems, she displays a series of objects in an introspective exploration of her experience moving between physical space and the digital realm. Porcelain plaques, with the roundness of social media profile images, bear the faces of Facebook friends and are arranged by algorithmic logic rather than personal evaluation, based on shared locations, interactions, and common interests. Lulay analyses the relationship between what the smartphone offers – in terms of perception, connection, convenience, and immediacy – and the ways it can limit our day-to-day real-life experiences.

While Lulay maps belonging within personal networks, Top does so across social movements. “Reversed Surveillance” examines the passage of French legislation allowing the use of AI-enhanced surveillance during protests. Using accessible algorithms and footage from a demonstration in Paris, Top collected around thirty-thousand faces and applied the same Algorithmic Video Surveillance tools deployed by the authorities, exposing their fundamental inaccuracy. While the process revealed that algorithms struggle to decode the nuances of human emotion, Top argues that accuracy does not matter to those in power: when the aim is repression, the findings will always serve that purpose. In response, he trained an algorithm to identify police units, reversing the gaze and, therefore, surveillance entirely. In the work, surveillance becomes a ground for accountability rather than control.

Where Top places police at the centre of the frame, Yousefi centres the protesters. Working with archival photographs of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, he searched for something routinely overlooked: the protesters who turned from the crowd and looked directly into the camera. To look back and claim one’s place is to assert belonging, both to a crowd and history itself. Through the images, the subject and object exchange roles, flipping traditional power dynamics. The people looking at the camera become the ones to take the image, through their gaze more than any other lens.

What the show ultimately highlights, as curator Conze describes it, is photography's dual effect: its capacity to make those who appear together seem naturally connected, while concealing those left out. “Community: Photography and Belonging” leaves us with a question: within an image, how much of what we see is actually there, and how much have we been guided to feel?