The skin demarcates our boundaries and keeps us ‘in form’. It is, however, permeable in both directions: we make contact with the outside world through it, breathe in and out through it, and sense touch and temperature through it. And when the image projected through the pupil makes contact with the retina, is that a touch, too? And does an ‘image’ become a ‘feeling’, like heat or cold?

In the exhibition titled Hautsache (A Matter of Skin), the Fotogalerie Wien brings together seven Austrian artistic positions using photographic image processes. The works address moments of touch remembered and imagined, the longing for (and impossibility of) closeness and intimacy.

A camera can be used to more or less peel away and capture a motif’s visible surface. Even though photographs often seem two-dimensional and without physical substance, the works in Hautsache reveal the fine gradations and depths of our most superficial organ.