by Johanna Siegler // Feb. 17, 2026
Dörte Eißfeldt’s photography is grounded in the experience of seeing: a relational seeing that holds in view not only the self and the world, but also the photographic object itself, which can act as a vital intermediary between the two. Making us encounter gentler close-ups of a neck pressed into sheets of silver, nebulated, spectral hands and snowballs that seem to glow far beyond the print’s surface, her largely self-taught photographic practice probes phenomenological questions of appearance, perception and form.
At C/O Berlin, ‘Archipelago’ brings together Eißfeldt’s photographs with the materials that surround their making, placing sketchbooks alongside working prints, contact sheets and other small objects shown in vitrines. The exhibition, curated by Boaz Levin, foregrounds these often private formats, making visible how much of the work was made to fit a life as it was lived: portable, episodic and continuously renewed. Nearly a decade after Eißfeldt stepped down from her professorship in Fine Art at HBK Braunschweig, the exhibition picks up on the playful modus the artist brings to revisiting her own work, which was first articulated in the 2024 publication ‘Stehen, Liegen, Hängen.’
According to Levin and Eißfeldt, the exhibition attends both to the photograph’s objecthood and to its capacity for transformation. That curatorial aim is realized in the sustained attention given to Eißfeldt’s serial works, the careful hanging executed with experimental lightness that allows the eye to move between registers and in the show’s insistence on encounters with material and surface that structures the visitor’s path through the exhibition space. Seated on folding chairs between the floating vitrines of Eißfeldt’s ‘Archipelago,’ with the installation still underway and metal occasionally clinking around us, we spoke about seeing photographs, and about photography’s own ways of seeing, alongside the question of what it means to grant institutional visibility to works that had to function within lived constraints.
Dörte Eißfeldt, portrait // Photo by Catherine Peter
Johanna Siegler: First of all, thank you so much for taking the time. I’ve already had a quick look—everything looks really beautiful. My first question is about the exhibition title. Could you say a little about how it came about?
Dörte Eißfeldt: When we began planning the exhibition, I thought it would be wonderful to show many of my sketches, notebooks and related material in vitrines. It’s always been a dream to present that side of the work publicly. Boaz immediately picked up on it, as always, and said, “Oh yes, an archipelago of vitrines.” I wasn’t familiar with the expression, so I looked it up. ‘Archipelago’—right. It turns out we did mean the same thing. When it came time to find a title, I thought: that word is simply beautiful. Boaz agreed, and now we’re sitting right in the middle of my archipelago, between these little islands.
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Hals 07,’ 1994 // © Dörte Eissfeldt / VG Bildkunst
JS: I’ve been looking closely at the vitrines and at the extraordinary range of object types. What was it like to look back across five decades and decide what belongs together?
DE: Making the book ‘Stehen, Liegen, Hängen’ in 2024 marked a turning point in how I relate to my own practice. The book grew largely out of work that began during my studies, but it is really a book about the studio—about its architecture and the way my works gather there in all their forms. My house is split in two: one entire half makes up the studio, spread across two floors. After 10 years out of my professorship, I finally had the time to return to my work with sustained attention. That was the catalyst. When we found out we would do the exhibition at C/O, I found myself experiencing a burst of energy. Then, I gathered everything in the span of two days, testing arrangement after arrangement and vitrine by vitrine on a makeshift table I had built in my studio to those exact dimensions. I enjoyed it a lot.
And then there was the ever-present question of materials. The pink ground beneath the objects inside the vitrines is photographic paper that, over time, will register the imprint of each object placed upon it. This was an idea I really wanted to integrate into the exhibition, but had just given my own stock away. Then someone arrived with a partly used roll, which came from the studio of Sibylle Bergemann. To use it here, underscoring my own works, felt like an honor.
It also underlined something I care about: how the materiality of each work changes with time. For instance, I made this piece in Vitrine 5 as part of a grant application on the theme of portraiture. It’s an old copy, which you can see in the paper itself: that woody stock that has yellowed with age. In the vitrines, I tried to group these elements so they speak to one another, materially as much as visually.
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Hand Dessauer 02,’ 1988 // © Dörte Eissfeldt/ VG Bildkunst
JS: Did you think about archiving already as you worked?
DE: Not really. Many of the works in these vitrines came into being precisely when I wasn’t able to make exhibitions, or produce large prints, often because I had to earn money, as many artists do. I taught for a long time—25 years—and only in the last 10 years have I not been teaching. That’s why there are so many early sketchbooks and collections of material. At the time, I also had a small child. So these were things that had to function within life’s constraints, and they were meant to be like that. From the beginning, I’ve grown alongside this small format. The south-facing wall in the second room carries works that I could never really show on the wall, and many are personal favorites. Some are sketches for larger works, but others are complete in themselves.
For a time, especially in certain photographic contexts like the Düsseldorfer School of Photography, enlargement became the common imperative. Now attention has shifted again back toward materiality. Especially against the more recent background of digital photography and printing, which became mainstream around the turn of the millennium, the physical presence of my photographs has, again, drawn a different kind of consideration. And there’s a pleasure in that.
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Schneeball 01,’ 1988 // © Dörte Eissfeldt / VG Bildkunst
JS: Yes, the image becomes a thing.
DE: Exactly. And there are practical changes too: these magnets with which we hung the ‘Rücken’ series in Room 3, for example, they didn’t exist before.
Without the frame, you experience the work as an object, much more directly. In my studio, where magnetic strips are placed across the wall, I too study every picture as an object, often by living with the images for days, weeks, years. That’s how they meet me: as material presences. At the Sprengel Museum, I encountered this approach in an institutional setting for the first time. In a group exhibition, the curator, Inka Schube, presented all works unframed. Among them was my ‘Schneeball’ series, which I had only ever shown in frames. It was fantastic, and here we’ve been able to realize it very well.
JS: Something I find striking is how your work makes viewers question their own habits of seeing. The compositions feel extremely considered—sometimes formally defamiliarized, but in a way that brings you closer to the object, closer to experience. How did that approach to seeing develop?
DE: I come out of painting. This insistence on composition I bring to every image, no matter what it is. And I’m always curious: what happens when I photograph something? What becomes of the object? What becomes of my experience? The image has to remain active. It has to speak back to me. That’s not something you can decide in advance. Some people need half a lifetime to find their own mode.
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Großer Flieger,’ 1986 // © Dörte Eissfeldt / VG Bildkunst
JS: In your teaching you also incorporated art theory. How is your own work positioned in conversation with these discourses?
DE: I think I always carried that “photographic” approach with me. I come from painting, I studied film and I only began working with photography after my studies. I had to claim the medium for myself, on my own. The first theoretical text that truly confirmed me—some people will smile at this—was Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida.’ I was in France at the time and read it in the original, before it was translated. Barthes looks at images, really looks at them. That act of looking at my own pictures and asking what’s in them, and approaching them anew once there’s a first print or a contact, that resonated deeply with me. It gave me confidence in the position I had already assumed. And there is, of course, his concept of the “punctum,” which describes the way that in a photograph, something can suddenly leap out at you. This can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. That’s what’s so extraordinary—you can’t really explain it. It’s simply there. That happens to me too with my own images after many years, and I hope it happens to others somewhere, in ways I can’t predict. Most recently, I felt a resonance with Franziska Kunze’s book ‘Opaque Photography.’ She distinguishes between photography as a window, especially today on social media, where attention is fixed on “what’s in the picture,” and photography as opaque: the image as screen, as surface, as object. I was glad to see that aspect become, so to speak, worthy of theory.
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Internett F 105,’ 2009 // © Dörte Eissfeldt/ VG Bildkunst
JS: A final question: what do you hope visitors take away from the exhibition? Perhaps even something that changes in their own way of seeing?
DE: In a way, you’ve already answered it. It’s all about that moment of transmission—when someone is touched. It might be an image, it might be a room. A resonance, a relation to the world, to experience. And I think in this exhibition it’s not too difficult for photography to be perceived as a medium in its own right, for there to be a sense of what it means to make an image of the world. Not in a didactic way—more as a kind of attunement. That awareness often gets lost.
Exhibition Info
C/O Berlin
Dörte Eißfeldt: ‘Archipelago’
Artist Tour: Saturday, Feb. 21; 6–7pm
Admission: € 12 (€ 6 reduced)
Exhibition: Feb. 7–June 10, 2026
co-berlin.org
Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin, click here for map
