Artists

Laurianne Bixhain, Eric Chenal, Rozafa Elshan, Lisa Kohl, Bruno Oliveira, Armand Quetsch, Daniel Reuter, Romain Urhausen, Daniel Wagener

Press release

Nosbaum Reding Gallery in Brussels is pleased to announce its new exhibition, Zone de contact, which will run from 22 January to 7 March 2026, curated by researcher and art critic Raya Lindberg. With this show, Nosbaum Reding is reviving its long-standing photography programme, which has featured numerous Luxembourgish photographers in the past, including Martin Linster, Yvon Lambert, Eric Chenal, Carine and Élisabeth Krecké, Daniel Reuter, Sébastien Cuvelier and, more recently, Yann Tonnar. This is also an opportunity for the country to renew its commitment to promoting photography, a long tradition that started with photographer and curator Edward Steichen, whose UNESCO-heritage-listed Family of Man enjoys worldwide renown. Luxembourg can pride itself of its international recognition in the realm of photography, which has been continually promoted and supported by institutions such as the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA) and Konschthal Esch, as well as by Luxembourg’s continuing presence at the prestigious Rencontres photographiques d’Arles since 2017. For this exhibition, which focuses primarily on Luxembourgish photography, the selection centres on pioneering figures and younger practitioners whose work explores the spatial possibilities of the photographic medium. It brings together a wide range of techniques and artistic approaches to question the way in which photography and the photographer’s gaze connect and link objects, bodies, places and documents. Zone de contact thus allows viewers to appreciate the variety of social, intimate and symbolic interpretations of the world that speaks through the work of nine Luxembourg-based photographers. Each in its own way, their varied conceptions of the photographic image relate to an environment that is akin to a ‘zone’ – a space in between that reflects both forms of imagination and ways of seeing and observing reality.
-
What happens to the experience of contact when the image, detached from its medium, settles in the relationship it maintains with the place where it is displayed, the bodies it illuminates and isolates, and the possible conflicts arising from its perception by diverse subjectivities? Photography is remarkable in that it miniaturises the appearance of things by dissolving their corporeality yet leaving their meaning intact, writes photographer Joan Fontcuberta. Photography always tends towards a doubling of the environment, creating a ‘contact zone’ between the modalities of seeing and the object that makes its trace possible. However, photography cannot be fully controlled by either its subject or its technical apparatus. Traditionally, photography is a product of chemistry. Yet it is also intrinsically digital because it is the result of a gesture (pressing the shutter release) used to create an image. This action does not necessarily encounter its object; rather, it is often indeterminacy that the lens, if not the eye, faces. This explains the effectiveness of AI’s image devitalisation processes, as it attempts to mimic this indistinct, hybrid zone between truth and fiction, between distance and proximity. It is only through its impact that we can understand what has happened in the image, all the more so as there is clearly a dissociation between photographic intentionality and its embodiment by the medium. The desire to make contact and touch things, inasmuch as it resists any totalising vision, creates indecisive zones that can nevertheless be said to denote corporealities. Although they are ephemeral, these corporealities correspond to the multiplicity of the social, human and non-human nature of our world. For the artists in this exhibition, the process of seeing and reporting through images is, above all, a way of seeking to regain a sense of proximity to that which seems distant. The uncertain spaces captured by the photographic gaze thus reveal the contours of a body, the fragmented remains of a narrative, the tangible materiality of an object, the violence or gentleness of a gesture, the micro-erosion of a wall, the presence of a sprouting plant in an urban environment or the feeling of isolation and deprivation conveyed by a plain room. Clearly, for each of these artists, this desire to connect through images challenges the idea of a unified vision of reality. Ultimately, they all attempt, each in their own way, to establish zones of contact, in much the same way as one would rebuild a connection.

Raya Lindberg