Opening: Monday, 29 September 2025, 7 pm.
Opening speech: Johan Nane Simonsen
Guided exhibition tour + talk (DE): Mafalda Rakoš & Ana Casas Broda, moderated by Johan Nane Simonsen: Thursday, 2 October, 6 pm.
As part of FOTO WIEN.
As part of an artist research project by FOTOGALERIE WIEN, Austrian artist Mafalda Rakoš was hosted by HYDRA+FOTOGRAFÍA in Mexico City in 2025. HYDRA was co-founded in 2012 by artist and publisher, Ana Casas Broda, and is regarded as an independent platform that develops photography-related projects based on reflection and cooperation. The scope of its activities includes educational programmes, a photobook publishing, a specialist book shop stocking international photo books, exhibitions and numerous events. Publishing is the main focus of the HYDRA+FOTOGRAFÍA presentation in the FOTOGALERIE WIEN; here authors can develop their photobooks in the form of a creative, open and unique process. In the intercultural programme, Photobook Incubator artists can experiment with various narrative forms, hybrid production methods and collaborative practices. HYDRA+FOTOGRAFÍA has already published over thirty books and these will be on show and presented by Ana Casas Broda at FOTOGALERIE WIEN.
This year, Mafalda Rakoš conducted a series of workshops aimed at local artists and concerned with the social and artistic dimensions of portrait photography. During the two week intensive programme, the group experimented with different approaches to portraying others. This form of analytical interaction has also been of great importance in Rakoš’ own practice for many years. During her three month stay in Mexico City, the artist documented encounters with friends, strangers and acquaintances. The resulting portraits are, in a wider sense, works of joint authorship with the depicted persons and deal with the encounter itself and the social and political contexts within which they are situated. This method of working continually involves a confrontation with the subject of control. Other people are invited to intervene in the photographs literally; my picture should become ours. The exhibition will present a selection of the resulting portraits, photographs, over-paintings, films and sketches. A projection will not only show pictorial works but also fragments of conversations between the thirteen workshop participants.
Ana Casas Broda, was born in Spain and lives in Mexico. She is an artist and a founding member of HYDRA+FOTOGRAFÍA. She also heads up the workshop and publishing programme. Her complex identity, rooted in Vienna, Spain and Mexico, informs her curatorial practice which is focussed on dialogue and intercultural cooperation and thus forms a special context for the exchange with Mafalda Rakoš and the FOTOGALERIE WIEN. During the exhibition, Ana Casas Broda will also be presenting the photobook, Álbum, on which she has been working for fourteen years. It was published in Spanish, English and German and contains pictures and texts by her and her grandmother. It can be regarded as a reflection on photography as a significant instrument in the construction of historical and personal identity. Ana Casas Broda portrays her own personal history because her view of the photobook as a medium and her professional praxis as an artist, teacher and publisher is deeply embedded in her life which has taken place between two continents. Spaces in which various cultures, languages as well as ways of thinking and working all come together are essential for her in advocating and encouraging critical dialogue about photobooks today. In her homeland of choice, Mexico, it was only at the end of the 2000s, with the coming of the internet and the democratisation of the camera that photography was able to escape its use as an instrument of power.