“Inner Landscapes” exhibition: Photography in context

Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “Inner Landscapes” online exhibition for Mental Health Awareness Month

Der Greif presents the launch of the online exhibition, “Inner Landscapes”, in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. This special online exhibition endeavors to expand cultural comprehension and foster a more inclusive conversation within the art community through the diverse languages of photography.

We selected artworks by eleven artists foregrounding mental health and its relationship to everyday life. We are considering how internal experiences are shaped by social, cultural, and environmental conditions, and how they are expressed through image-making. The work engages with care, fatigue, stability, imbalance, support systems, and personal coping strategies while addressing individual experience and considering how mental health is influenced by broader structures such as work, family, community, or access to resources.

The exhibition begins with the sensorial impressions of "Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst," in which Agnes Zimmermann portrays the lived experiences of neurodivergent people, specifically, people with synesthesia. The work explores how subjective individual qualities of experience (‘qualia’) can be communicated, artistically processed, and visualized. The images are based on in-depth conversations between Zimmermann and project participants. They discussed the enrichment people experience through these additional sensory impressions, as well as the sensory overload or difficulties of fitting into society as a person who perceives the world differently.

Our next artist similarly explores psychological states and focuses on the feeling of "cultural liminality" or being suspended between two cultures without fully belonging to either. Ruiqi Xu’s “Neither Here Nor There” takes the artist’s move from China to the U.S. at eighteen as the starting point. Xu explores the quiet, persistent isolation that stems from "cultural misreading," much like a very famous product of cultural confusion: the fortune cookie. The fortune cookie, a Western invention masquerading as a Chinese tradition, is a reflection of Xu’s identity. For him, photography and staged imagery serve as a vital tool for externalizing internal fragmentation. The process of collecting fortune cookie slips and creating fictional narratives is an act of reclaiming agency over my identity. It addresses the mental weight of displacement and the longing for authenticity in a world of cultural stereotypes.

Mental health is also inseparable from broader social and political realities in Santiago Mesa’s ongoing project "Jaidë." Focusing on the suicide crisis affecting Indigenous Emberá communities in Colombia, Mesa traces the emotional aftermath left in the wake of loss rather than documenting the act itself. His photographs attend to families, domestic spaces, and communities living with the enduring effects of armed conflict, displacement, cultural rupture, and institutional neglect. Drawing from his own experiences with depression and anxiety, Mesa approaches these stories with sensitivity and care, revealing how mental health exists not only as an individual struggle but as a collective condition shaped by historical and structural forces.

Where Mesa examines collective trauma, Zina Bluhm turns inward in "trial and errors." Created during a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital following a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, the photographs function as visual records of internal dialogues and emotional states. Photography became both a coping mechanism and a means of translating experiences that often resist language. Through intimate and deeply personal imagery, Bluhm demonstrates how image-making can become a practical tool for navigating moments of psychological crisis while creating space for self-understanding and resilience.

Questions of memory, mortality, and care emerge in Balázs Turós’ long-term project "The Nature of Things." Over the course of eight years, Turós photographed his grandmother as she lived with dementia, transforming the work into a collaborative exploration of aging, loss, and acceptance. While the series documents the gradual changes brought about by the disease, it is equally a reflection on the artist’s own anxiety surrounding death. Photography becomes a means of maintaining connection, creating moments of intimacy and shared experience while confronting the inevitability of change. The resulting images offer a moving meditation on vulnerability, family bonds, and the emotional complexities of caregiving.

In "Autophagy," Jay Ng approaches adolescence as a process of destruction and renewal. Borrowing its title from the biological process through which cells recycle themselves, the series explores the emotional turbulence of youth as a necessary stage of transformation. Drawing inspiration from Sigmund Freud's writings on life and death drives, Ng photographs young people navigating vulnerability, uncertainty, and self-discovery. Rather than framing mental health struggles solely through crisis, the work considers emotional conflict as part of an ongoing process of growth, positioning scars and setbacks as evidence of resilience rather than failure.

Fantasy, symbolism, and personal mythology shape Chuanduan Chen’s "transparent like a beast." The project visualizes emotional wounds, experiences of discrimination, and feelings of alienation through images populated by animals, imagined creatures, and symbolic figures. Drawing upon both personal experiences and observations of cruelty within everyday life, Chen creates photographs that speak in the language of instinct rather than explanation. These works explore the desire to remain emotionally honest and vulnerable within environments that often demand conformity, transforming private struggles into poetic and open-ended visual narratives.

Alex Lockett’s "Stray" examines the psychological landscape of family separation, migration, and belonging. After his mother emigrated from the United Kingdom to Arizona during his childhood, Lockett found himself moving between two worlds without fully inhabiting either. Returning to Arizona as an adult, he uses photography to revisit fragmented memories and unresolved questions surrounding family, identity, and home. Blurring the boundaries between documentation and emotional projection, the work demonstrates how photography can become a tool for reconciliation, helping to navigate feelings of distance, longing, and connection.

Questions of visibility, care, and consent are central to Sofia Pratas Morais’ project "desculpa." Created during the final years of her grandmother’s life with Alzheimer's disease, the series consists of photographs in which the artist's grandmother repeatedly refuses the camera. Rather than treating this refusal as an obstacle, Morais understands it as a powerful assertion of presence and agency. The resulting images challenge conventional expectations of portraiture and representation, exploring how illness reshapes relationships while raising important ethical questions about photography, memory, and the desire to hold onto those we love.

Alina Bobrova’s "Poisonous Soil" investigates the relationship between masculinity, inherited trauma, and emotional vulnerability. Through collaborations with young adults in the United States and Kazakhstan, Bobrova examines how family structures, cultural expectations, and patriarchal systems shape experiences of shame, fear, isolation, and disconnection. The project approaches mental health not as an individual issue but as a social and intergenerational condition, encouraging viewers to consider how emotional wounds are transmitted, normalized, and sustained across generations.

The exhibition concludes with Elizabeth Pedinotti Haynes’ "Litany for Dirt (and other Ordinary Miracles)," a playful yet incisive exploration of motherhood, identity, and resistance. Working with family archives, domestic spaces, food, found materials, and staged interventions, Haynes challenges the expectations and moral frameworks that often define motherhood. Through surreal photographic tableaux, household objects take on new life, memories become unstable, and everyday experiences transform into acts of reflection and defiance. The work proposes play not as escapism but as a meaningful strategy for confronting pressure, preserving personhood, and imagining alternative ways of being.

Across experiences of neurodivergence, migration, grief, dementia, family relationships, caregiving, adolescence, trauma, and identity, these projects reveal the many ways internal realities are shaped by the worlds we inhabit. The exhibition invites viewers to consider mental health as an ongoing negotiation between personal experience and collective circumstance.