Display Cabinet No. 5: ANNA LERCHBAUMER

Opening: Saturday, 7 March, 7 p.m.
Finissage and publication presentation: Saturday, 10 October 2026, 7 p.m.

DISPLAY CABINET is an exhibition situation created in 2023 in the entrance area of FOTOGALERIE WIEN. Every six months, installations or interventions will take place in the space. The fifth intervention will be designed by the artist Anna Lerchbaumer.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication.

The starting point is what remains: photographic materials, rejects, leftovers – seemingly worthless things that accumulate during the artistic photographic production process. Collecting and arranging becomes the method. Photographic paper, film boxes, film strips, packaging, cut-offs, cardboard rolls and mis-exposures are all included. These materials, which were originally intended to carry an image, become carriers of a different narrative themselves. The pieces strike a balance between order and dispersion, gesture and discovery, placement and chance.

The material becomes a repository of stories. This exhibition examines the sensual and narrative qualities of photographic materials beyond their function of producing images. What stories lie dormant in the remnants? What traces does the production process leave behind? What aesthetic and ecological inscriptions become visible? Here, photography does more than produce images; it expels its own material afterlive. The body of work sinks into the pile of material and becomes part of the structure itself.

There is no image, rather a play with traces.

Petra Noll-Hammerstiel