Guest Room aims to spark collaborations. That’s why Foam curator Mirjam Kooiman is teaming up with Dominic Hawgood in choosing the theme for this instalment. Dominic is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice has emerged out of photography’s expanded field, and progressed towards site-specific installation. He investigates psychological space through photography, light, CG, animation and design; reflecting on the experience of the real world within the virtual. His work spans both still and moving image, with an increasing use of digital media informed through an interest in visual computing, perception, and the role of the lens within VFX.

This open call is aimed at artists working with photography as a tool or input material to create virtual realities or alternative perceptions of reality. We hope to see work that focuses on enhanced ways of capturing, representing, and interacting with the physical world, or that uses photography to create hyperreal virtual worlds.

The potential of photography is the greatest it has been as technologies converge making creation limitless. It is now possible to bridge the gap between the digital and the real-world, and image capture is facilitating the closing of this loop. One should possibly think of photography as a gateway into the virtual, a tool of choice by visual computing pioneers such Paul Debevec, able to deconstruct the world around us and to seamlessly merge it into the pipelines of VFX.  Photography pushes realism and object creation, through techniques like photogrammetry, material scanning, and light capture, and it is precisely these approaches being utilised within emerging pipelines such as Virtual Production (VP). The film industry is currently undergoing a massive shift into real-time with the evolution of GPU based rendering, and interesting to see is the role of photography within this.

Why submit to Guest Room?

• Show your work to outstanding curators and gallerists.
• Get the chance to be published at Der Greif website, a highly-frequented international source of photographic art.
• Submit for free or for a small donation – you decide.

Voluntary donation

After over a decade of serving the international photography community Der Greif is now finally a registered non-profit. We believe this organizational structure best reflects our artistic and cultural mission. As always, your artistic contribution makes our work on Der Greif possible.

Since starting Guest Room in January 2015, we’ve been working hard to invite a broad range of practitioners, from gallerists to editors and curators. We are convinced that this format is an interesting and low-barrier approach to help artists get their work in front of people who might be interested in working with them. For this reason, we are asking you to consider making a financial contribution as well. That’s why we’re suggesting a voluntary donation of 5 € as a submission fee. 100% of the funds we collect from your donations will go towards helping us continue providing interesting opportunities for the photography community through Guest Room, and thus expand Der Greif.

We believe in inclusivity. We don’t want this suggested donation to stand in the way of your submission. If you are unable to contribute financially, please send an email to voucher@dergreif.org to receive a voucher code which will allow you to enter for free.

Thank you so much!

Mirjam Kooiman is an art historian and curator at Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam, where she is responsible for a number of exhibitions among which Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács - Point Cloud, Old Growth, Daisuke Yokota – Matter, and Dominic Hawgood – Casting Out The Self, and the traveling Foam Talent exhibitions of 2015, 2016 and 2020. In 2017 she initiated a series of collaborations with photography platforms in Mexico, Nigeria and Indonesia in Foam’s project space Foam 3h, in order to create an exchange of cultural knowledge on photography discourses worldwide. She is currently researching the intertwining of photography with virtual and augmented realities, artificial intelligence, gaming and online experiences. Mirjam holds a BA in Art History and a MA in Curating Arts and Culture from the University of Amsterdam. She previously served as a curator-in-training at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Mirjam has written for artist books and publications such as L'Internationale, Something We Africans Got, Migrant Journal, and she is a regular contributor to Foam Magazine.

About Der Greif Guest Room

Guest Room is a monthly online exhibition with open submissions curated in real-time by personalities from the international photography scene. Der Greif is an award-winning organization for contemporary photography. It is print-publication, online-publication, curatorial team and joint project all at once. Der Greif connects the digital and the analogue, exploring and expanding the borders and limits of image-distribution and -reception in the digital era.