Concept and Image is the name of the collective and also the title of their ongoing project, a hybrid exhibition and publication that explores the intersections between image-making, materiality, and collaboration.
Emerging from a shared postgraduate context, the group extends its practice beyond the institutional framework into a sustained dialogue on the possibilities of photographic encounter and collective authorship.
At the centre of this exhibition lies a zine that functions not merely as a vessel for images, but as a sculptural and conceptual object in itself. The publication brings together the distinct practices of several artists whose approaches to photography vary in genre, technique, and sensibility. Their works are bound through an unconventional, central spine – a device that allows the object to open from multiple directions, to be viewed and handled from either side, or even to be entirely unbound. In this sense, the zine resists linearity: it is a structure of perpetual rearrangement, inviting the viewer to navigate through images in a non-hierarchical and relational manner.
This dynamic form recalls what Roland Barthes described as the “plural text”, a space where meaning is not fixed but performed through reading and re-reading. Similarly, Concept and Image transforms the act of viewing into an act of assembly: each encounter is contingent, each sequence provisional. The work gestures toward the idea of “the open work” (Umberto Eco, 1962), where incompleteness becomes a principle of participation and renewal.
The artists’ decision to bind their individual works into a single object that can also be disassembled becomes a metaphor for the collective itself. Their practices, often divergent and situated within distinct photographic traditions, find connection through this shared physical and conceptual framework. The binding, therefore, is not only a technical solution but a proposition: that coherence can emerge through structure without erasing difference.
Concept and Image is conceived as a recurring project, reassembled annually with new works drawn from the artists’ evolving practices across different geographies. In doing so, the publication becomes both archive and renewal – a means of sustaining dialogue and proximity across distance, and a reflection on the changing conditions of image-making in a dispersed, post-institutional context.
Participants: Jeremy Chi-Hao Chuang, Julia Bohle, Polo Ferrera, Juno Joo, Zhuoheng Li,
Nina McCue, Ema Širec, Ye Zeng.
Curated by: Ema Kobal
Free admission.
2. 12. 2025–3. 1. 2026
Organisation: DobraVaga / Kino Šiška.
