“(Inter)faces of Predictions”: Misunderstanding photography from physiognomy to AI through Sheung Yiu exhibition at C/O Berlin

An anticipation of the exhibition by Sheung Yiu, the 2025 C/O Berlin Talent Award winner

C/O Berlin presents “(Inter)faces of Predictions,” the exhibition of the 2025 C/O Berlin Talent Award winner Sheung Yiu. On view from 7 February to 10 June 2026, the exhibition opens on Friday, 6 February 2026 at 20:00 at C/O Berlin in the Amerika Haus.

Photography has long been shaped by the assumption that it can reveal truth directly, transparently, and objectively. From its earliest applications to its most advanced computational forms, the medium has repeatedly been trusted as a tool that shows us what is. “(Inter)faces of Predictions,” the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Finland-based artist-researcher Sheung Yiu, offers a compelling visual archaeology of this assumption tracing a continuum from ancient practices of face reading to contemporary facial recognition technologies.

At the core of Yiu’s practice is the face: photographed, scanned and classified. Across cultures and centuries, faces have been treated as legible surfaces from which character traits, morality, intelligence, and even futures could be predicted. Photography enters this history not as a neutral observer but as a powerful amplifier. Once the face is captured by the camera, it becomes fixed, comparable, and archiveable, thus ready to be measured, ranked, and believed. Yiu demonstrates how photography has consistently been misread as evidence rather than interpretation. Western physiognomy and East Asian face reading, though culturally distinct, share a reliance on visual correlation and symbolic shortcuts. In both cases, the photographed face is mistaken for a reliable index of inner truth. Contemporary facial recognition systems inherit these same assumptions, cloaking them in the language of data, efficiency, and objectivity. The exhibition makes clear that algorithmic vision does not mark a radical break from the past, but rather its continuation under new technological conditions, a topic further explored by the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2025 in the Theorist category Megan Williams, arts writer, editor, and researcher. Williams will author the first art-historical essay on the winning project, to be published alongside an interview with Sheung Yiu in an artist monograph produced by Spector Books for C/O Berlin, released on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition.

A recurring motif in the exhibition is the ‘ouroboros,’ a serpent devouring its own tail, which structures the exhibition as a circular journey. This symbol captures the self-reinforcing logic at the heart of photographic systems: images inform classifications, classifications shape how new images are read, and the cycle repeats. Photography is thus misunderstood as a tool that discovers patterns, when in fact it often reproduces and legitimizes pre-existing beliefs. The authority of the image conceals the cultural, political, and historical assumptions embedded within it.

Yiu’s use of materials further complicates photography’s claim to objectivity. Prints on calligraphy paper and text engraved into stone reference historical methods of knowledge transmission in East Asia, while metallic and illuminated surfaces evoke contemporary technological infrastructures. By placing these materials in dialogue, Yiu exposes how every era mistakes its dominant visual technology for truth. Photography, science, and algorithms alike promise clarity and precision, yet remain deeply entangled with ideology and power.

The exhibition culminates in a video essay in which Yiu appears as an avatar traversing a landscape that is gradually revealed to be his own face. This moment poignantly collapses one of photography’s most persistent myths: its indexical bond to reality. In an age of deep fakes and synthetic faces, the photograph no longer guarantees presence, identity, or authenticity. Yet our faith in images persists.

“(Inter)faces of Predictions” ultimately reveals that photography has been consistently misunderstood as a neutral mirror of the world while it has functioned as a cultural practice shaped by belief systems. Yiu’s work asks viewers to confront this legacy and to question why, even now, we continue to trust images that promise knowledge while quietly shaping how we see, judge, and govern one another.

This critique resonates with the shortlisted projects, each of which challenges photography’s claim to digital image cultures with a focus on facial reading, facial recognition and their impact across different historical and cultural contexts. In “Last Rites,” David de Beyter stages a fictitious sociological study of stock car racing subcultures through 16mm film. By deliberately blurring documentary observation and staged fiction, de Beyter unsettles photography’s authority as ethnographic evidence and reveals how social rituals are shaped as much by representation as by reality. Olia Koval’s “12 Frames” rethinks war photography by rejecting the singular, decisive image. Instead, her panoramic, multi-perspectival approach shows how conflict infiltrates everyday life in Ukraine. In” Cash Me Online,” Amandine Kuhlmann examines self-representation in digital space through performative videos and self-portraits shared on social media platforms. By staging a digital alter ego that oscillates between confidence and vulnerability, Kuhlmann exposes how photography online is often mistaken for authenticity, while being deeply shaped by platform aesthetics, gendered expectations, and algorithmic visibility. Cheryl Mukherji’s “Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl” interrogates the family archive as a site of control. By juxtaposing traditional Indian studio portraits from arranged marriages with fragmented contemporary self-portraits, Mukherji reveals how photography has historically fixed women’s bodies into prescribed roles.