Sensing Matter: From the Infra-thin to the Photographic Object (Punctum Gallerii, Tallinn, Estonia)

Exhibition Sensing Matter presents a selection of works examining photographic materiality and objecthood. The exhibition asks a simple question – at what point might a photograph become visible as a thing? – and develops from it a study in perception and encounter. Moving from barely visible vapours and light sensitivities – which might not appear as images at all – towards sculpture and installation, which seem to take the photograph away from the wall to encroach into physical space. The exhibition studies the matter and gestures of the photographic image, many of which are usually hidden out of view. Spanning moments of invention and production, to the transformations and afterlives of images, the exhibition brings into view subtle qualities and characteristics that photographs, in their familiarity, usually conceal: an apparition-like sense of possibility, and an ongoing potential found in the residue.

As photography remains pulled between the extremes of a supposedly weightless transmissibility and a presence that is often associated with nostalgia or redundancy, a central proposition of the exhibition is to think the photographic through Marcel Duchamp’s notes on the infra-thin: a subtle but sensitive communicative frequency which hovers on the threshold of perceptibility. In their experiments with what a photograph can do or be, the works in the exhibition test the parameters of a familiar medium. They move from record to catalyst, from historicity to possibility. In so doing they invoke many Duchampian motifs: vapours and gases, shadows and refractions, doubles, chance and accident.
The exhibition includes work by eleven artists: Kristine Krauze-Slucka, Reinis Lismanis, Agata Madejska, Suzanne Mooney, Hanako Murakami, Juuso Noronkoski, Xanath Ramo, Alnis Stakle, Eva Stenram, Ryudai Takano, and Laure Winants.
Curator: Duncan Wooldridge is an artist and writer, and is Reader in Photography in the School of Digital Arts, Manchester School of Art, MMU. His research spans photographic materiality, experimental photography and conceptual art, the photograph’s future tense, and the stickiness of images. He is the author of ‘To Be Determined: Photography and the Future’ (2021, SPBH/MACK), and the co-editor with Lucy Soutter of ‘The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies’ (2025, Routledge) and ‘Writer Conversations’ (2023, 1000 Words), as well as the editor with Ana Casas Broda and Anshika Varma of ‘Photobook Conversations’ (2025, 1000 Words) and the forthcoming ‘Written Up/Written Down: The Selected Writing of John Hilliard (2026, MACK).