Opening speech (excerpt) Petra Noll-Hammerstiel, Spotting, 

as part of ©FOTOWIEN, 2019

In her Snapshots series, which she began in 2017, Brigitte Konyen starts from more or less quickly captured snapshots of people from her personal history. She scans this color and black and white material, processes it and develops it. From the resulting fine art prints, collages 

are made manually, i.e. unique pieces. In a long, laborious process of selecting, fragmenting and composing, Konyen subjects the photographs to a, also intuitive, rearrangement. 

For Konyen, photographs are never the final result, but are always the starting point for further processing. Her process of appropriation is initially destructive, as is 

the case, for example, in her photo woven images or in her montages of torn-up photographs. In these, as here in the Snapshots series, 

she often uses images from her own biography, i.e. images of events in family history that have already passed and can only be remembered. 

The Snapshots series is based on photos of her female ancestors on her mother's side from several generations. Pictures of women from older times with a religious-conservative social context collide with younger ones. 

The women have only slowly managed to free themselves from traditional restrictions, which is also reflected in their more or less revealing presentations and clothes. They are images for a cultural memory of the female body. The medium of collage and the long work on the material, helped Konyen to delve deeper mentally into the family history, without the individual stories ultimately dominating. 

From excerpts of photos from different times that were removed with extreme cuts, new pictures were created, mostly divided into two, three or even multiple parts, divided vertically into strips of different heights. 

The heads are basically not visible; Individual parts such as arms, legs, feet, parts of upper bodies, and thus gestures, poses and body language, determine the images. In most cases, new, surreal formations were created by juxtaposing body parts of different people and proportions. The images oscillate between reality and appearance; the unity of action, space and time is broken. 

Konyen opens up a view of her story, but at the same time refuses to clearly read and ascribe the characters, constructs her own reality from numerous small scraps 

of memory.

Petra Noll-Hammerstiel, 2019