Guest Room: A Door Is not a Border

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 Amin Yousefi and Danit Ariel from Photoworks this edition invites artists to reflect on “A Door is Not a Border”.

Domestic space has long accommodated forms of intimacy, expression, and collective life that are constrained or prohibited in public. These experiences help us consider domestic space as something continually produced through the relationships between bodies, their surroundings, and the conditions under which they live. 

Across different parts of the world, domestic spaces are becoming increasingly unstable under political, social, and environmental pressures. War and forced displacement have made the boundary between private and public life uncertain, while state intervention and changing legal conditions reach into the organisation of everyday domestic relations. These conditions have different histories and consequences, but each reveals how the continuity of domestic life depends upon forces beyond the control of those who inhabit it.

Photography occupies a particular position within this tension. Images made in domestic environments record relationships and gestures that may have been possible precisely because they remained outside public view. Their subsequent circulation introduces another form of exposure, while photographs of interiors may also preserve traces of ways of living that political or historical circumstances have since made impossible.

For this Guest Room, we invite photographic works that investigate the instability of domestic space and its relationship to the political and social conditions of our time. We are interested in how these conditions transform the experience of inhabiting a space, the freedoms exercised within it, and the forms of resistance that emerge when domestic life can no longer be taken for granted