Katrin Froschauer, Valentin Backhaus, and Mateusz Dworczyk, you curated the exhibition. Could you briefly introduce yourselves, tell us a little about FOTOHOF, and describe how you’re connected to it?
FOTOHOF is a multi-generational artists‘ association in which we function as a team, that has existed for forty-five years. The founders are working side by side with the middle generation and the youngest generation, to which we belong. The exhibitions, the program, all of that is decided in a very democratic way within the group. That means there are no fixed curatorial positions, which is why the curatorial teams are always changing and project-based. That’s how the three of us came together as a curatorial team. We also have several areas within the FOTOHOF: the gallery, the archive, and the publishing house. Across these three areas, we work in different constellations and on different projects all the time. This is the second exhibition we are curating together.
Mateusz: I’ve been part of FOTOHOF for over three years. I studied photography, and I’m also active as an artist. As a group of three, we have a particular interest in Extended Photography: photography that also moves into other media. The first exhibition we curated last year was Extroverted Images, which dealt with photography in relation to sculptural and installation-based works. So photography that leaves the picture frame, that leaves the wall. This time, we decided to move into the performative space: positions that work performatively and photographically, or photo-performatively. Works where photography is at the centre, on equal footing with the performance.
Valentin: For around five years, I’ve been part of the team. Katrin and I work very closely together as a duo in Studio Fjeld: we cover certain areas, primarily across the publishing house and FOTOHOF’s exhibition spaces. I’m also active as an artist, both in photography and in an artist collective.
Katrin: Within the FOTOHOF, I cover different areas: from the curatorial side to the publishing house, since we also have a photo-editions publisher where we print publications. I’m also closely involved in project-based work, including graphic design.
Still Performing. „Still“ has many meanings: still as in still happening, a moment that is still here, not yet over. But also still life — the stillness of the moment when something is photographed, the fact that it’s not video, not a continuous medium, but a very fixed moment. Could you explain that from both a conceptual and a technical perspective? You mentioned that performance and photography exist together on equal footing in this exhibition; how would you describe that?
Mateusz: You’ve actually already interpreted the title quite correctly. The title is intentionally ambiguous. On the one hand, it plays on the English „still“, meaning „still ongoing,“ suggesting that the performances extend beyond the image. The question of when a performance ends and when it begins is deliberately left open. A very clear example of this is the work of Andy Kassier, in which the performance extends beyond the image into social space: on social media, for instance, or even through the artist’s appearance in real life. It’s simply not possible to say definitively when the performance starts and when it stops – a sense of continuity, of duration in time.
And the other meaning of „still,“ which you also identified correctly, relates to the still image: photography’s capacity to extract a single moment from the continuum of time. But it can also be read cinematically. Milena Wojhan works in a strongly performative way and approaches photography as an independent medium in its own right. Yet there is also something filmic about her work: she often works in sequences. They could be individual stills pulled from a performance. That’s exactly what the title is pointing toward.
Milena Wojhan had a performance during the opening of the exhibition, right?
Mateusz: Yes, she was sitting in front of a backdrop meant to represent a photo studio context, photographing herself while smiling, a quiet, unassuming smile that is still there. She sustains that smile for around twenty minutes. At a certain point, it tipped over, it probably started to feel a little uncanny, it comments on the behavior of people when taking the photo, on how we’re always encouraged to smile in photographs, how someone always says smile! She challenged that pose and that gesture that we all know. What’s also wonderful about it is that it’s the performative act that everyone recognizes.
Laughter also comes out in work by Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp, but sometimes also in the work by Andy Kassier’s work, not only physically but also metaphorically.
Mateusz: Kassier has created this artist persona over time. What’s fascinating is that he dives into this role and merges with it. He selects settings for his pictures very deliberately: architecturally, they are villas, luxury properties, spaces that pick up on this theme of success. And more broadly, his work engages with ideas of masculinity, of achievement, of self-optimisation. He takes that theme and stages himself accordingly in front of these properties: wearing a suit, pushing everything to a slightly ironic extreme, and then, of course, posting it all on social media. That’s where it becomes truly interesting, because this narrative, these circulating images, simply carry on. The performance doesn’t end with the shot: it’s carried into the digital space. And there the boundaries start to blur: who is this character? Is this actually him, or has he been consumed by the role? That tension is exactly what makes it compelling.
Valentin: We are showing his works from around 2015-2017. The images are staged in such a way that there’s a kind of perfection to them: a level of polish that might make you think they could be AI-generated. And that’s quite fascinating, how that perception is shifting right now. AI has essentially absorbed that kind of perfection, and the internet is so saturated with it. That definitely plays into how his work is read. And that carries through into how the works are presented in the gallery space as well: large-scale photographs, what you might call blockbuster images in hand-polished metal frames. The luxury existence is continued in the objects themselves.
Going from Andy to Florian and Larissa. Andy uses the digital space as a stage, as a performative platform. With Florian and Larissa, at least in their work, For Revolutionaries, is part of the exhibition. They inhabit representative historical buildings and make their way through performance. Specifically, the Prunkstiegenhaus der Neuen Burg and the painting collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum are the spaces where the performance took place, which they then translated into photographic form: individual portraits, but also group portraits.
Katrin: In those, you see protagonists whose identities are more or less concealed, because they’re wearing masks: masks that come from the beauty industry, some of them heavily made up. These figures take on gestures and poses that reference classicist revolutionary paintings. At the same time, they’re wearing costumes, hairdresser capes, highlight strips, and objects that read almost as beauty accessories. And from that tension emerges a really interesting constellation: on one side, resistance; on the other, a kind of normative femininity embodied through those very objects.
Rather than being curated by a single person, the exhibition was developed by three curators presenting four artistic positions. Tell us about the dynamic of the process.
Valentin: As Mateusz already described, the starting point is this shared interest in Extended Photography: something that runs through all of our artistic practices. We’re all coming from the same area of interest; we each bring our themes to what we’re negotiating for the exhibitions.
Mateusz: Performance and photography felt like a natural next step. Something that interests all of us right now. When you dive into a topic like this, there’s always a longer research phase. You’re not just looking at which artists fit the theme; you usually start with one or two who already feel right, and then it’s like a recipe: you need to find the others and add a bit of salt, a bit of pepper. You do some theoretical research, and you look around.
Mateusz: But there’s always this moment, I find, when you’ve been working on a theme for a long time, and you finally close it: you think, this is the perfect group. Everyone’s been approached, and everything is set. And then suddenly five more artists come to mind, and you think, oh no. Why didn’t we think of them? We’ve known them for so long. It’s always a moment of slight frustration, where you wish you’d had more time. But you can’t, time isn’t infinite. At some point, you have to fix things: invite people, confirm, arrange transport insurance, and so on.
I think the notion of the mask is significant across all three positions in the exhibition. From a conceptual standpoint, how does that connect to political history, gender, and so on?
Katrin: We’re very much dealing with identities and social roles. And you see that throughout the works. In Milena’s work, it’s very present through masks and prosthetics, which, on the one hand, reflect certain societal body images but also suggest how those images might be transformed. And with Florian and Larissa, especially in Queer Revolutionaries…? the inscription of identity, that social conditioning, comes through very strongly. Through the masks, what has historically been excluded becomes visible.
Your exhibition text mentions artists engaging in subversive ways with institutional and discursive spaces. How does the subversive dimension come into that?
Valentin: If you look at Andy’s work, for instance, it’s a form of reflection on how social media constructs identity and self-presentation. That in itself is already a form of subversiveness. He’s not simply doing it; he’s parodying it, engaging with it ironically, and through that, the work becomes subversive in itself, because it carries a critique within it. You can say the same about Milena — take her work Lupa, for example, in which she engages with the mythological figure of Lupa. It relates to the Roman founding myth. Lupa is the she-wolf from the myth of Romulus and Remus: the two brothers who, according to the myth, were found and raised by a wolf bearing that name.
Katrin: What Milena does is tell a different story, an alternative narrative that also exists, which says that Lupa was not a wolf at all, but a Roman prostitute who took the children in and raised them. That version has been somewhat suppressed, perhaps overwritten. And there’s obviously a critique embedded in that. She developed a prosthetic together with a make-up artist, and performed with it — I believe at the Academy of Arts in Munich. Alongside that, there’s the photographic image. The work is fundamentally about the overwriting of femininity, of these counter-narratives, and on the other side, a patriarchal construction of history. Within that lies a very clear, quite explosive critique.
2026 is an important year for photography, as it marks the 200th anniversary of the first photograph. Is there any program at FOTOHOF associated with this anniversary?
Katrin: The FOTOHOF itself has a 45-year history, which is almost a quarter of the entire history of photography. There’s a team actively engaging with this topic and the upcoming exhibition. And I could share the program’s loose idea for now only. The idea is to invite artists to exhibit their first conscious photograph, the moment when they felt something genuinely photographic had been created. These will be shown salon-style, with a dense, floor-to-ceiling hang. And it can be either the very first photograph they ever took, or the first they considered a conscious artistic work. We are really curious to see how it comes together.
Group Exhibition: Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp, Andy Kassier, and Milena Wojhan: Still Performing
Curated by: Valentin Backhaus, Mateusz Dworczyk, Katrin Froschauer
Exhibition duration: 12. June – 30. July 2026
Opening times:
Tuesday–Friday: 3 PM–7 PM
Saturday: 11 AM–3 PM
Address and contact:
FOTOHOF
Inge Morath Platz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.fotohof.at
For more information about the exhibition, visit www.fotohof.at/en/exhibitions/still-performing/
Since its foundation in 1981, FOTOHOF has been the centre for artistic photography in Salzburg, with diverse activities at home and abroad. In addition to the exhibitions in the gallery in Lehen, FOTOHOF’s program includes one of the most extensive photo-specific libraries in Austria, an internationally active photo book publishing house, an archive for historical and contemporary photography, international touring exhibitions, and a wide range of educational offers with workshops and discourse events.