Foto Arsenal Wien

#2 min Peter Watkins

9. 3. 2026

FOTO ARSENAL WIEN 2025 © Michael Seirer Photography
FOTO ARSENAL WIEN 2025 © Michael Seirer Photography

Opened in March 2025, Foto Arsenal Wien (FAW) is Austria’s shiny new national centre for photography and lens-based media. Conceived as a dedicated platform for contemporary photographic practice in the expanded field, FAW situates itself as a medium-specific institutional space, presenting historically informed perspectives, an expansive international outlook, with a prerequisite emphasis on education and inclusivity.

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Through its exhibitions and public programmes, it has quickly established a clear role within Vienna’s already burgeoning cultural infrastructure. Its influence extends through ambitious collaborative activities such as FOTO WIEN festival, a longstanding biennial that FAW have been running since 2023, and Festival Vienna Digital Cultures – a platform co-run alongside Kunsthalle Wien dedicated to examining the forms of influence within digital image cultures.

Situated just outside Vienna’s central district, Foto Arsenal Wien, as its name suggests, occupies part of the historic Arsenal complex, adjacent to the Museum of Military History, in green, unexpectedly peaceful surroundings. Its location encourages purposeful visits, inviting audiences to engage with its approximately 1,000 m2 of exhibition space. It’s conceived as a central platform for exhibition, research, and discourse that treats photography not as a subsidiary medium, but as a critical and autonomous field within contemporary art. At the helm is Felix Hoffmann, the German cultural scholar and curator. Prior to his role at FAW, Hoffmann was Head of Programmes and chief curator at C/O Berlin from 2005 to 2022, where he shaped exhibitions, public programmes, and institutional strategy. During his time at C/O, he curated numerous international solo exhibitions, including shows on Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Lindbergh, and Gordon Parks. It’s this experience that he is now transplanting into Vienna's cultural landscape, with an ambitious vision for photography’s position within the city. He takes up the role of Artistic Director, with curators Mona Schubert and Marit Lena Herrmann as lead curators.

One of their major forthcoming exhibitions is a retrospective of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, presenting over 200 works, 250 publication reproductions, rare books, and audiovisual projections, giving an unprecedented insight into the artist's life and work. Organised by the Instituto Moreira Salles (Brazil) in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation (Japan) and curated by Thyago Nogueira (IMS) with Marit Lena Herrmann (Foto Arsenal Wien), the exhibition situates Moriyama’s work in conversation with present-day issues of media manipulations, state surveillance, and image fetishism – this should be well worth a visit.

Text | Peter Watkins

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Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins is an artist and educator whose work is rooted in photography and explores themes of loss, trauma, and history through archival and materially-driven practices. His projects have been exhibited internationally, including The Unforgetting and Unearthing (Lidice). Founder of Postcards for Palestine, he also lectures at FAMU and Prague City University, and his work is held in major collections such as the V&A and Museum Winterthur.

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The expansion of generative artificial intelligence models, the refinement of deepfake technologies, advanced image synthesis, and even the filtering of reality through augmented and virtual reality are transforming previous demands on origin, “truthfulness” (Hito Steyerl, Jean Baudrillard), and the values of visual communication. Yet this issue does not concern manipulation alone — it also points to a deeper shift in the very framework through which we recognize and, above all, perceive authenticity. Continuous existence on the threshold between the physical and the virtual changes our visual sensitivity: we adapt to synthetic images (Lev Manovich, Katherine Hayles), refine our ability to recognize their origins (Peter Weibel), while simultaneously feeling less and less need to do so. The artificial becomes emotionally valid. We inhabit hybrid landscapes and situations (Joanna Zylinska, Jussi Parikka). The topic traces the shifts in aesthetics, technical possibilities, and the ethics of image production at the interface, but also transformations in viewers’ needs, expectations, and sensitivity to hybrid imagery on an individual level — and their influence on the need to anchor identity in a rapidly changing world. It explores authenticity not as a static value but as a dynamic relationship between author, technology, audience, and a world that no longer exists merely “in front of the lens.” The focus of the issue also opens up questions of the ethics of technological progress — linked to the broader social discourse on environmental impact, colonial heritage, marginalization of minorities, and other contemporary topics — seeking new methodologies that allow us to understand the authenticity of the image within wider societal contexts.

Beyond Gallery Walls: Fotograf Zone Explores How We Live as Neighbors

#4 min Editorial

Beyond Gallery Walls: Fotograf Zone Explores How We Live as Neighbors

Fotograf zone ExhibitionFestival Fotograf Zone 2026

The 16th edition of Fotograf Zone Festival has announced its full program. From October 1 to 11, the festival will bring exhibitions of contemporary photography and visual art to Prague alongside performances, DJ sets, author readings, workshops, lectures, audio walks, a group bike ride through the city, and even a communal apple harvest. Under this year’s theme, Wild Kin, the festival explores different forms of multispecies coexistence and looks for ways not only to observe but also to experience our relationship with other living beings and the environments we share.

Amak Mahmoodian – Exile and Return

#2 min Amak Mahmoodian , Peter Watkins

Amak Mahmoodian – Exile and Return

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In conditions of social and political displacement, when borders harden and the right of return is deferred, the dream can be understood as a psychological form of resistant consciousness. Amak Mahmoodian’s insistence on the dreamworld as a site of social and political resistance finds its roots, perhaps, in the enduring prominence of poetry in Iranian society. For centuries, Persian poetry has functioned as a central civic language through which political consciousness, cultural memory, and personal (be)longing are articulated.