“Surreal Fables” exhibition: Photography in Context

Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “Surreal Fables” online exhibition

Der Greif presents the launch of the online exhibition, “Surreal Fables,” arriving on the eve of an impending Friday the 13th. Throughout human history, visual symbols, ancestral rituals, and communal tales have served as vital compasses to navigate fate, luck, and the spectral unseen. This month, we bring together twelve lens-based artists who dismantle and reconstruct fables, superstitions, and folklore for the contemporary moment, probing how belief systems emerge, transform, and endure.

Far from functioning merely as quaint historical relics, myth and superstition operate across these works as living frameworks of resistance, self-invention, and social critique. From staged theatrical illusions and investigative documentary to talismanic objects and altered landscapes, these projects examine how the irrational and the mystical make sense of our material reality. Together, they demonstrate that invoking the uncanny is a profound way to confront the unresolved questions of identity, power, and belonging.

The exhibition opens with Peter Franck’s "Still Waiting," where surreal collages suspend time along a razor-thin threshold. Franck juxtaposes disparate objects and figures in a state of fragile equilibrium, capturing the breathless fractions of a second before decisive action unfolds. By lingering in the liminal pauses between occurrences, his imagery treats the photographic plane as an ambiguous space where certainty dissolves and surreal flights of thought take root.

Deepening this encounter with the elusive, Lisa Gervassi’s "Unseen Fragments Vol.I" moves through the shadows of the occult and the unexplained. Avoiding explicit linear storylines, Gervassi builds an atmospheric web of enigmatic symbols, fragmented gestures, and tactile rites that hover deliberately beyond immediate comprehension. Her photographs position mystery not as a riddle to be solved, but as an open-ended territory where viewers must confront their own instinct to assign order to the unknown.

From atmospheric abstraction to tangible ritual, Renaud Morin’s "Geister" immerses viewers in the snowy, twilight valleys of Appenzell, Switzerland, documenting the ancestral winter custom of the Silvesterchlausen. Following masked figures whose carved faces and heavy bells announce their arrival across rural farmsteads, Morin captures the moment where human form gives way to otherworldly presence. The series approaches masquerade as a living threshold where the visible landscape merges with ancestral memory and nature's unseen forces.

In a related exploration of protective disguise, Eda Demir’s "threshold" (EŞİK) excavates the survival of shamanic imagination within contemporary Turkish culture. Focusing on the Tülütabaklar tradition of Balıkesir, where villagers donned animal skins and soot to deter enemy forces during the War of Independence, alongside vernacular agricultural scarecrows, Demir charts how communities craft symbolic boundaries in response to uncertainty. Her research-driven images reveal that ritual disguise is not a forgotten curiosity, but a persistent cultural gesture designed to cultivate collective safety.

Dev Dhunsi’s "Mixed (outtakes)" shifts folklore into a diasporic, hybrid landscape, using myth as an antidote to categorical rigidity. Blending Norwegian, Indian, and Japanese entities, from the river-dwelling Fossegrim to Ganesha, Kali, and the shapeshifting kitsune, Dhunsi disrupts demands for cultural purity. Mirrored inside drifting soap bubbles and superimposed across Scandinavian terrain, these composite apparitions carve out a speculative space where queer, multiracial identities can thrive beyond fixed genealogies.

In "In The Forest Behind My Father's House," Aline Papenheim applies the concept of shapeshifting to the transforming spruce monocultures of Germany's Sauerland. Engaging a queer and neurodivergent lens, Papenheim repurposes thermal scopes, trail cameras, and drones, tools engineered for surveillance and control, to blur the boundaries between hunter, deer, witch, and new growth. The series treats the enchanted forest as a site where local Christian dogma and pagan fables collide with ecological fragility, asserting that sensory not-knowing is a valid form of knowledge.

Erli Grünzweil similarly interrogates inherited doctrine in "Where Deer Fly and Stones Cry," an autofictional journey rooted in their Austrian hometown named "Paradise." Drawing on a local legend of a shape-shifting stone blessed by the Holy Family, Grünzweil weaves staged scenes with ancestral drawings to peel back the idyllic facade masking societal trauma, addiction, and religious rigidity. By tracing elusive deer through an abstract, humanless landscape, the project reimagines myth as a tool for non-binary liberation and self-reclamation.

Turning from local landscapes to national heritage, Eszter Sárkány’s "A bit more yellow, a bit more sour..." examines the alienation felt by Hungarian youth under sixteen years of political hegemony. Rather than surrendering national traditions to conservative ideological monopolization, Sárkány stages playful, analytical tableaux featuring her closest friends and family across rural and urban Hungary. Her photographs reclaim folk customs as living, malleable, and autonomous spaces capable of embodying the hopes of an evolving generation.

In "Chupacabras," Eleana Konstantellos André turns an investigative eye toward media-manufactured myth-making in 1990s Mexico. Constructing staged scenes informed by archival news footage and period reporting, André dissects how the frenzy surrounding the blood-sucking cryptid acted as a deliberate political smokescreen during a season of economic and social turmoil. Her images reveal how governments and mass media cultivate monsters to weaponize fear and manipulate collective perception.

Hannah Guy’s "In Light of Waking" looks to the nighttime architecture of the mind, gathering anonymous dream submissions across Leeds to construct illuminated, tableau-style “dream windows.” Translating recurring anxieties regarding gentrification, financial instability, and bodily vulnerability into collective allegories, Guy draws on Jungian archetypes and social dreaming. Presented as luminous lightboxes, the photographs position nocturnal fictions as critical shared texts that transform private dread into collective empathy.

Grief and spectral conjuring converge in Briar Pine’s "Notions of Heaven," which constructs an earthly afterlife following the sudden passing of the artist's mother. Rather than seeking solace in distant religious abstractions, Pine gathers physical remnants, hair, worn jewelry, and handcrafted domestic objects, to summon maternal ghosthood into the tangible world. The work treats these tactile relics as talismans, rooting the notion of paradise in the labor of active remembrance.

The exhibition concludes with Fiona Veronique’s "Guillemette," an inquiry into maternal superstition, stage magic, and Western New York’s history of 19th-century Spiritualism. Spurred by a conversation linking family rituals to obsessive-compulsive patterns, Veronique stages deceptive photographic encounters that deliberately blur mediumship with theatrical illusion. Exploiting the camera’s historic complicity in fabrication, the work hovers between faith, hysteria, and the occult, questioning how women have used magical performance to navigate reality.

Through staged cinematic tableaux, archival interventions, communal dreams, and protective masquerades, these projects demonstrate that superstition and folklore remain vital survival strategies. The exhibition invites viewers to step across the threshold and consider how the stories we inherit, conjure, and question continue to shape our visual reality.