"VULNERABLE AND FORGOTTEN PEOPLE"

"Vulnerable and Forgotten People - From Kosovo and Metohija to South Africa and the Middle East", presents a quietly harrowing and deeply human body of work by South African-born photographer Katharine Cooper.

The exhibition opening will take place on June 4, 2026 at 18:00. The artist will be present and present her work in person.

Shot exclusively on analog film, Cooper's images refuse to look away from communities that have been forgotten by history. The exhibition includes works from Kosovo and Metohija, sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and Iraq and brings together some of the most morally powerful and visually moving photographs of recent years. Together, the works paint a picture not of isolated crises, but of a shared human condition - lives irrevocably altered by forces far beyond individual control.

There are photographs that inform and photographs that remain. Katharine Cooper's work belongs to the second category. In an age of incessant digital images, where the suffering of others is consumed and forgotten in seconds, Cooper radically slows down the gaze.

Her choice of analog photography - particularly her Hasselblad 500C, a gift from her father - is not a stylistic gesture. The medium demands dedication, from photographer and subject alike. Each image is consciously composed. Nothing is captured casually. The resulting photographs carry the weight of this concentration: they breathe, pause and demand to be looked at again.

"The purpose of her work is humanity and compassion - and she has captured both in a wonderful way." - HELEN HAUBENSACK-BITTERLI, CURATOR

At the center of the exhibition is a series of photographs taken during Cooper's trip to Kosovo and Metohija in 2016. In haunting black and white, she documents the Serbian population in the aftermath of the armed conflict of the late 1990s - people who stayed when others fled, who continue to tend gardens, light candles and raise children, within enclaves characterized by insecurity, restricted freedom of movement and the slow loss of cultural continuity.

These are not images of spectacle. No dramatic ruins, no staged gestures. Instead, Cooper focuses her gaze on the intimate: a worn interior, a cautious gaze, the closeness between parent and child. It is in these quiet details that the weight of the story becomes particularly palpable.

The larger scope of the exhibition is also impressive. Works from Mozambique document communities marked by post-colonial instability and environmental disasters. Images from sub-Saharan Africa show poverty and ecological hardship with the same cautious dignity. Photographs from Syria and Iraq - where Cooper was one of the first journalists to enter the city after the liberation of Palmyra in March 2016 - tell of displacement, memory and reconstruction in cities destroyed by war.

Throughout the exhibition, Cooper resists the temptation to reduce people to symbols of suffering. Her photographs insist on individuality, presence and resilience. They challenge viewers not only to perceive distant realities, but also to take on the ethical responsibility of looking closely.

"Vulnerable and Forgotten People" is ultimately an exhibition about memory, displacement and endurance - but above all about the refusal to remain indifferent.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.