Reviews

Gloria Hasnay

A durational view on Tiphanie Kim Mall at Fächer, Berlin

It’s common practice to return to an exhibition’s photographic documentation online; to re-read the accompanying text; to bring it up with friends; or, if you’re lucky, to speak about it with the artists themselves. Reviews tend to appear in due course, timed to the show in question. But sometimes thoughts take longer to gather, and a text arrives slightly later than expected. In this case, it is a year after Tiphanie Kim Mall’s solo exhibition at Fächer in Berlin, and so what follows may be considered a kind of durational (re)view. The artist’s show ran from September 7 to October 20, 2024, at the long-standing artist-run space tucked into the balcony passage above Kottbusser Tor. Since then, Tiphanie and I have had several conversations, and those exchanges now form the basis for this text. What struck me most was how much of her work(s) had to do with time: time passing, time withheld, time repeated. In that sense, writing about the exhibition a year on feels oddly appropriate.

Installation view: Eingang/Ausgang, Fächer, Berlin, 2024. © Tiphanie Kim Mall

If you’ve ever climbed those rattling metal stairs to Fächer, you’ll know its peculiar setup: a cubicle within a room, with two glass fronts—one facing the balcony, the other turned inward. Usually, the entire exhibition space can be surveyed with a single glance through the front window. This time, however, Tiphanie walled off the outward-facing side and spoiled the shortcut. While practical in solving the problem of fitting six new photographs made for the occasion onto not enough surface, the wall was just as much conceptual. It thickened a sense of enclosure, pushing the mild claustrophobia of the works on view into the architecture itself. The space was effectively boxed in and the frontage turned into something like a display case. Before you even stepped inside, the attention was pulled toward the largest of the artist’s new works: Eingang/Ausgang (Entrance/Exit), a nearly life-size image of a front door, sat behind the glass like a phantom portal, echoing Fächer’s actual entrance (and exit) just beside it. A sly mise-en-scène that set the tone for what followed. 

“The work,” she insisted, “only truly happened in the edit.”

The photographs on view began as quick, almost incidental shots, at first taken with her phone, later with small digital and analog cameras: doors, hallways, and mirrors glimpsed while Tiphanie waited for psychoanalysis sessions. They sat around as small prints in her studio for months before she began the slow process of “finding a form” in the darkroom. There, through various rounds of subtle analogue adjustments—color recalibrations, shifts in brightness and focus, tonal rebalancing, and variation in print sizes—the images took on their particular charge. Tiphanie described it as “editing in a cinematic sense”: a process of intuitive, durational experimentation until the photographs felt right. “The work,” she insisted, “only truly happened in the edit.”

That sensibility carries into how the photographs register. Each reads like a still from a film you can’t quite place, imbued with the mundanity of its subject matter. The works bring into view what usually slips past the eye, surfacing only in moments of your own waiting. Doors, mirrors, and staircases are rendered ordinary, but the careful editing makes them insist on being looked at. Tiphanie spoke of shadows pooling at the bottom of a frame, brightness creeping upward, a faint glimmer accentuating small details: a doorknob, a peephole, a scratch, the outline of a reflection. The works don’t quite seem to announce themselves, but once you’ve noticed them, they hold your gaze. The exhibition, in that sense, rewarded patience—more than perhaps most of us are used to giving a glance—refusing to perform immediacy, instead alluding to the slow tempo of its making. Standing out-/inside Fächer a year ago, I didn’t yet know all this. Only now, after several conversations with Tiphanie, do I think of the show less as a fixed event and more as a practice of attention: hers in the editing, mine in the remembering, and ours together in looking.

Installation view: Hinter dem Spiegel; Treppe, Fächer, Berlin, 2024. © Tiphanie Kim Mall

Time and repetition course through the series of C-prints. Psychoanalysis itself is durational—a rhythm of return and protocol—and Tiphanie’s photographs may be read as mirroring this structure. She described how some images “crawled out during the waiting,” as if the idle minutes before a session had produced their own record. In this sense, the works similarly hold duration, saturated with hours spent in the darkroom where editing became less technical correction than narrative construction through tonal adjustments. Take Warten (Waiting), for example: it stages the tension of access granted or withheld, showing the door to the artist’s therapy room. A faint beam of light lingers on the knob, holding the viewer’s gaze in the same stasis as that of the analysand, with the stare fixed until it finally twists and the door opens. Hinter dem Spiegel (Behind the Mirror) pushes tension differently: photographed into the practice’s bathroom mirror with an old analogue camera, the inherent blur was later amplified by literally shaking the paper during exposure. What might appear accidental was in fact deliberate, embedding unease and movement into the print.

One photograph, Treppe (Stairs), is the outlier. Taken on the way to the artist’s old studio rather than the analyst’s practice, it was folded into the series to interrupt the repetition of closed thresholds and open another register of meaning. The staircase vertiginously follows a downward path; basements, the unconscious, or simple retreat come to mind. Like with the other works, it could be anywhere. Specifics fade and slip into the role of universal psychic markers: a door always implies a threshold, a mirror projection and reflection, a staircase descent. This is where the photographs gain their resonance, negotiating between the offhand quality of snapshots and the weight of overdetermined symbols, between incidental gestures and carefully staged edits. The “dustiness” of psychoanalysis seeped into the works as well: interiors once marked by classiness gone somewhat desolate. Mundane and spectral at once, the works carry a ghostliness that threads through the series. Just look at Spiegel (Mirror), which doubled as the invitation card: an overly ornate mirror holding the reflection of two scruffy doors nestling against each other, one leading out of the practice, the other to who knows where.

Installation view: Spiegel; Warten, Fächer, Berlin, 2024. © Tiphanie Kim Mall

The photographs presented at Fächer resist confession. Rather than disclosing aspects of the artist’s private life, they offered access to her act of framing it. We were placed in step with her gaze, looking alongside her. This staging produced a kind of doubling: the artist observing herself, and the viewer observing that observation. Each image sets up a promise only to undo it on second glance: doors that refuse entry, mirrors that withhold reflection, staircases that descend into nowhere. Passage is staged, then denied, then staged again, and so on, until this repetition tips into dizziness. As if in a hall of mirrors, every depiction cancels out the very thing it represents. In this way, the show brought photography’s double bind into view—forever both revealing and withholding, forever flattening depth into surface.

That sense of withholding echoes in Tiphanie’s earlier video Hauskatze (House Cat) (2022), for which she strapped a camera to her cat’s collar. The work appears to indulge voyeuristic desire by offering the pet’s intimate perspective of the artist’s home. Yet what it delivers is abstraction rather than revelation of intimate detail. A scene of the artist typing an email, for example, renders the act of writing visible while leaving the content illegible. Intimacy emerges structurally, not through disclosure. In both Hauskatze and the works on view at Fächer nothing personal is ever revealed. Instead, what is granted is access to a gaze; to the transformation of experience into form. 

Such concern with mediation extended into the actual frames of the works. Two works, Spiegel and Warten, were given passe-partouts, while the others were not. A mat becomes another window, another step down into the image, another layer of distance (from the glass). Tiphanie admitted she worried at first they might be too much, too conservative. In the end, the decision sharpened the stale, dusty feeling of the psychoanalytic interiors while setting up a witty tension between formality and informality: crooked, almost “bad” pictures dressed in the solemn attire of classic photography. 

Installation view: Fächer, Berlin, 2024. © Tiphanie Kim Mall 

The logic of framing was also folded into the show’s documentation. Tiphanie shot it herself, choosing vantage points that doubled the works as images within images: the antechamber framing the gallery, Fächer’s pale window frame encasing Eingang/Ausgang. The resulting photographs formulate another version of the exhibition, sequenced with the same patience as the prints on view. Every choice—frontal or oblique, where to crop, how to order—functioned like another edit. Exhibition, photographs, and documentation thus form a single system that destabilizes the distinction between still and moving images, at least in terms of their treatment.

The titles extended this logic of framing and deferral. On the handout, they appeared almost like stage directions. WINDOW: Eingang/Ausgang; INSIDE, CLOCKWISE: Hinter dem Spiegel, Treppe, Doppeltür, Spiegel, Warten. Most are blunt descriptors; two introduce other registers. Warten is inseparable from analysis, yet it also resonates with the making and viewing of art—waiting for a work to yield something, or for an idea to arrive. Hinter dem Spiegel points to the literal door behind the photographer while also nodding to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, with its Alice-in-Wonderland shifts of scale and perspective. These titles situate the works within lived experience without disclosing it outright, much like another one of Tiphanie’s earlier videos, Schwester (Sister) (2021), which names a relation without explaining it further.

“Intimacy emerges structurally, not through disclosure.”

The paradox of time in the Fächer photographs—their being taken in minutes yet refined over months—applies more broadly to Tiphanie’s practice. As she noted (echoing a friend’s remark), her work resists producing “reactive” images. The frame is chosen first, then patiently held, allowing something to unfold. Her photographs are less about seizing a specific moment than about dwelling in the possibility that something might occur. This is where the notion of “durational practice,” which has shadowed our conversations about the exhibition, comes into focus again. Duration here is not length but attention, an approach  that recalls Chantal Akerman, whose films turned the passing of time itself into the subject.

What continues to bind all of the above is an insistence on duration: quick shots slowly worked over months; an exhibition recalled a year later; everything shaped by repetition and return. A practice rooted equally in photography and video, using the patience of editing to probe their overlap. Tiphanie’s works unfold slowly, through waiting and (re-)framing, reminding us that meanings arrive in staggered intervals. Against this backdrop, her exhibition at Fächer offers an extended exercise in attention. Sometimes the most resonant shows are the ones that take the longest to develop—or the slowest to expose themselves in you.

Doppeltür, 2024. © Tiphanie Kim Mall

Gloria Hasnay is a curator, researcher, and educator. She currently serves as Curator of Kunstverein München and will assume the position of Director of Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in November 2025.