This autumn, HEIRLOOM presents two parallel exhibitions, the group exhibition Young Danish Photography 2024 opening at Fotografisk Center while also curating MC Coble & Louise Wolthers’ project Things Change Anyway: Trying, Feeling in our own space on Sølvgade. These exhibitions are thematically linked through a shared exploration of storytelling as a non-linear temporality.

We document our lives and surroundings with our phones’ cameras more than ever, and there is no doubt that photographs remain an integral part of our daily lives. Meanwhile, the way we interact with pictures once they are taken has changed drastically since the era of the analogue camera. We no longer develop the pictures we take. Instead, they stay on screens—for most of us, our sole interface—fundamentally shaping how we engage with photography today.

We now distribute and consume images through screens, and any discussion of materiality in relation to photography seems to belong to the dusty family albums of the past. The built-in technology of the smartphone’s pocket camera can enhance older images and manipulate the appearance of what we see, potentially severing the subject entirely from the notion of an original ‘here and now’. The temporality once embedded in printed photos, fading over time, can no longer be discerned, and as a result, when we look at a photograph in 2024, our gaze often meets an empty horizon.

Technological and economic developments have also made us more aware of global connections across time. We no longer live in parallel timelines around the globe but coexist in a single global present. These experiences are reflected in our culture and palpable in the art produced today.

Young Danish Photography 2024 takes stock of photography through the works of six artists and collectives, all of whom share a critical stance towards rigid ideas about linear temporality and chronology. In line with HEIRLOOM’s curatorial approach, the exhibition seeks to suspend the need to categorise in terms of young or old, Danish or global, contemporary or historical, and thereby to liberate and renegotiate the value placed on these categories throughout history.

The exhibition features a stream of images, blending new productions with existing works. All contributions are presented as projections, encountering the viewer head-on. The staging of Young Danish Photography 2024 strives to juxtapose, displaying works side by side regardless of whether they are moving or still, to draw attention to the content of the subjects portrayed. Our aim is to activate the exhibition as a place for conversation and reflection, where questions around the formal qualities of photography are set aside in favour of a focus on the visually generative stories of lived experience in local and global times.