guest room: difficult conversations

Guest Room is Der Greif's online exhibition format featuring open submissions curated by leading figures in contemporary photography. It is designed to foster collaboration, spark creative exchange, and amplify new voices in visual culture under a given theme. Curated by writer and curator Sofia Krysiak and photographer Jack Latham – co-founders of Terrible Baby publishing – this edition invites artists to reflect on "Difficult Conversations."

Sometimes it is hard to find common ground, and our disagreement pushes us apart. Sometimes we don’t have the language to articulate or convey how we feel about something, and other times, we are simply not allowed to express ourselves. Communicating something isn’t always easy, pleasant, safe or comfortable. Some conversations are difficult to have, so, how do we have them? Photography has long entered spaces where language falters, making us confront realities and our own expectations, revealing our own oversights.

This Guest Room invites artists to submit work that opens up difficult conversations, exploring social, political or personal realities and stories that refuse to be avoided and brushed under the carpet. Images do not simply make difficult subjects easier to understand. They can expose and conceal, humanise and stereotype, complicate and flatten. The same photograph can produce radically different readings depending on who is looking, who made it, where it circulates. At a moment when disagreement increasingly impedes conversation, opinion and expression are paradoxically abundant yet controlled, and information proliferates at such a pace that its veracity becomes difficult to gauge, can visual language help us have the conversations we need to have?