With AI and a wealth of new ways to manipulate photographs and visual imagery, photography itself exists in a time of breakthroughs and disruption. To examine this and the broader definition of photography, ARoS presents World in Focus; an exhibition celebrating photography in ARoS’ collection.  

The exhibition explores how we use photography as a way to examine the world around us and how photographers for the past 70 years have challenged our perceptions and the  meaning of objectivity. 

“Today, all of us are familiar with photography: most of us take photographs and snapshots several times a day with our smartphones. Technological development and changing ethical boundaries call for reflection on how we navigate and understand the power of photography and the way it shapes our world view – I hope World in Focus offers this reflective space,” says museum director Rebecca Matthews.  

You can look forward to discovering photographs by a wide selection of practitioners including Asger Jorn, Ismar Cirkinagic, Jeannette Ehlers, Jeremy Shaw, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, and Liu Shiyuan ranging from the poetic and contemplative, to the powerful and political. Significant recent acquisitions will be on view for the first time.  

The works range from Asger Jorn’s  mesmerizing light drawings from 1953 made with a small electric light and open shutter, to Liu Shiyuan’s contemporary algorithm-driven works made in 2022. Shiyuan works with machine-generated selections of images sourced from Google Image searches. By subtly changing keywords, language or adjusting the search criteria, Shiyuan documents the influence  algorithms have on the vast amount of data that informs the world around us.   

“All of the artists surveyed in World in Focus work experimentally with photography, and the exhibition demonstrates how technique, composition, or subject matter can make us see the world anew,” says ARoS curator Jakob Vengberg Sevel.  

The exhibition unfolds across four sections: Sampling, The Performative Body, The Veiled, and Landscapes as Memory. Viewed together, the exhibition raises questions about the human body, the climate and migration crises, war, and the condition of late capitalism.  

World in Focus is on view at ARoS Level 5 from June 22 – December 1, 2024. 

Press photos can be freely downloaded from Dropbox when giving due credit.

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