RMIT School of Art is thrilled to see so many staff, students and alumni featured in the NGV exhibition Melbourne Now.

Today we feature School of Art sessional lecturer Katrin Koenning.

German-born photographer and sessional lecturer Katrin Koenning migrated to Australia in 2003. This relocation had a profound effect upon her work, which often explores our connections to place, and belonging. The peripatetic artist takes her camera everywhere, creating an elusive, emotional, poetic and prolific body of photography whose subjects span the globe.

All the images in while the mountains had feet, 2020–22, were made during Melbourne’s lockdown period, or in brief moments of regional travel in between. Bringing into dialogue images from four different bodies of work, all made since 2020, the artist creates ‘fragments and slippages to suggest narrative spaces, communities and lived experiences that are allied, fluid and multiplicious’. Koenning’s abiding interest in place-narratives became hyper-localised when she, like many Melburnians, found her life limited to a five-kilometre radius. ‘Walking lent great comfort, day and night’, she explains. ‘Everyone was solacing in being held this way; roads and paths carried all our drifting bodies … No one knew how many years would pass. Were we awake or dreaming?’

Koenning documented her immediate communities and environment — loves, neighbours, animals, streets, parks, her apartment — revealing stories of entanglement, connection, intimacy, shelter and repair. This strange time became another reminder, she says, that ‘the close is revelatory and never fully known’. Presented as a large-scale installation, this grid of images suggests lapses and uncertainty, echoing the experience of Melbourne’s inhabitants during the pandemic.

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