Schools

Since autumn 2022, the Centre de la photographie Genève (CPG) has been offering a new cultural mediation programme for school audiences from grade 5P (8 years old). The 45-minute school visits, conceived and led by a facilitator, are available by reservation. This offer is free for school classes.Each visit is interdisciplinary and touches on art and photography as well as themes related to history, geography, technology or broad social issues such as exile, identity or the imaginary.

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From 28 February 2024 to 28 April 2024:
Exhibition ‘Making Light of Every Thin’

The Centre de la photographie Genève is pleased to present the group show Making Light of Every Thing, featuring thirteen artists who work with constructed, fabricated and reworked images. While today’s manipulated image is often associated with disinformation or the depiction of fictional universes, in this exhibition the images are often used to tell personal stories and to shed light on our own relationships with the world.

Through a variety of elaborate image manipulation processes, the artists featured in this exhibition are attempting to make visible and capture a form of subjective intimacy, whether by expressing emotion or evoking the bonds that unite us to others through photography. The pictures on show are the result of voluntary experimentation by their authors, whether created with colored paper, generated by artificial intelligence, produced entirely in the silver-photographic laboratory, or resulting from precise photomontage. Without making a hierarchy between paper cut-outs and sophisticated artificial image-generation tools, their clearly fabricated qualities underline the unexpected dimension of what may be the most familiar to us.

How can photography express the sudden strangeness of a once-familiar place? How can we tell the story of our memories, our complex and changing relationships with loved ones? How do we portray our sensibility? Through various exploratory photographic processes, the artists bring to light the complex mechanisms by which we apprehend the world, offering subtle and delicate traces of our individual subjectivities. The photographs presented in Making Light of Every Thing are all closely related to the personal histories of the artists, offering intimate narratives that stand in stark contrast to the manipulation of opinions often associated with constructed and fabricated images.

With Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, Jessica Backhaus, Emma Bedos, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Sara De Brito Faustino, Charlie Engman, Alina Frieske, Peter Hauser, Moritz Jekat, Leigh Merrill, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs and Martin Widmer.


THEMES AND DISCIPLINES

The visits address some of the central issues of the exhibition in an accessible and age-appropriate way. The number and complexity of the themes vary according to the age of the pupils. In all cases, the visit is based on the photographs and videos made by the artist.

Questions addressed during the visit include, depending on the age of the pupils:

  • The manipulation of the image: what is a constructed image? Does a photograph tell the truth? How are different images constructed (analog processes, computer programs, collages, etc.)?
  • The relationship between the visible and the invisible: how can we express something that cannot be seen? How to depict an emotion, a feeling? How can we recreate images based on a souvenir?
  • Exploring photography’s physicality: what happens in a film laboratory? How can paper, cut and rephotographed, create an impression of volume?
  • Experimenting with visual technologies: how do images generated by artificial intelligence, photogrammetry or photo montage actually work?
  • The online image: how do photographs circulate in today’s digital age, and how do they create connections? Where and how are they being displayed?

Depending on the age of the pupils, the subjects and themes covered during the visit include:

  • Image making and image manipulation
  • Photographic techniques and photography technologies
  • Remembrance, personal narratives, memory
  • Photography, art

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Venue: Centre de la photographie Genève, 28 rue des Bains, 1205 Geneva

Dates: 11 December 2023 to 11 February 2024

Hours: Visits with the facilitator by reservation only from Monday to Friday between 9:00 and 18:00 (school groups can be welcomed outside the museum’s opening hours). Tours without a facilitator are also possible. Reservations are necessary outside the museum’s public opening hours (Tuesday to Sunday 11:00 -18:00).

Age: all school degrees from 8 years old (5P)

Duration of the visit: 45 minutes

Languages: French or English

Price: free for classes

Reservation: via the online form

Further information: by email at visites@centrephotogeneve.ch or by phone at 022 329 28 35

Preparatory visit: Admission is free for teachers wishing to prepare a visit with their class. The preparatory visit is possible during the public opening hours of the museum, from Tuesday to Sunday from 11:00 to 18:00


FURTHER INFORMATION

The detailed description of the exhibition and the mediation offer is available (in French) in this PDF.