ARTTYCO TALKS
Corinna Rosteck investigates the fragile terrain where memory, perception, and embodiment intersect, creating works that transform fleeting moments into immersive experiences of reflection and change.
ARTTYCO TALKS | June 25, 2026.
EPISODE #30: CORINNA ROSTECK
1. Your work often unfolds at the threshold between image and movement, where photography begins to behave almost like a living surface. In your practice, what happens in that moment when a still image begins to carry the memory of motion?
C: What interests me is the threshold between image and movement. Although photography is traditionally associated with freezing a moment, my work seeks to activate the image through light, reflection, and the movement of the viewer. The metallic surfaces respond to changes in perspective and illumination, so the image is never fixed but constantly shifting.
Movement therefore does not exist only in what is depicted, but in perception itself. The viewer becomes part of the work, completing it through their physical presence. What emerges is not a captured moment, but the memory and sensation of movement within a continuously changing visual field.
2. Water, reflection, and the liquid state appear repeatedly in your work, almost as metaphors for perception itself. What draws you to this unstable territory between clarity and dissolution?
C: Water fascinates me because it combines transparency and opacity, clarity and mystery. It is a familiar element, yet it remains fundamentally elusive. Surface, depth, reflection, and movement coexist simultaneously. In my photographs and videoprojections, water becomes more than a motif; it becomes a way of thinking about perception itself. Through reflections, magnification, blur, and the interplay of light and shadow, recognizable structures dissolve into something more ambiguous. The viewer enters a space between observation and imagination, where certainty gives way to interpretation. This unstable territory interests me because perception is never fixed—it is fluid, subjective, and constantly shifting.
3. Many of your works emerge through collaboration with dancers and performers, where the body becomes both subject and medium. How does this dialogue with movement reshape your understanding of photography as a spatial and temporal experience?
C: My collaborations with dancers and performers have profoundly influenced my artistic practice. I am interested not only in movement itself, but in the human presence that becomes visible through movement—the interplay of confidence and doubt, vulnerability and strength, intention and expression.
The dancer is both subject and medium. Through movement, the body enters into dialogue with space, architecture, light, and time. I am fascinated by those moments in which personal presence and spatial structure briefly come into resonance. Rather than documenting choreography, I seek to capture states of transition, emotional intensity, and fragile forms of balance.
Through multiple exposures, projections, and immersive installations, photography expands beyond the fixed image. Time becomes layered rather than linear, and space becomes an active component of the work. In these collaborations, photography transforms into an experiential state of resonance in which body, image, movement, and perception continuously interact.
4. Your images often oscillate between abstraction and recognition, between something that appears familiar and something that slips away from definition. Is this tension a way of approaching memory, or perhaps a way of questioning how we construct reality through images?
C: I believe it is both. My work does not seek to create a faithful representation of reality. Instead, I am interested in the point where recognition begins to dissolve and the image opens itself to multiple interpretations.
Through reflections, fragmentation, extreme close-ups, blur, and shifting perspectives, familiar subjects become transformed. Water, bodies, and landscapes move between representation and abstraction. In many ways, this process resembles the workings of memory. We rarely remember experiences as complete and stable images; rather, we remember fragments, sensations, atmospheres, and impressions.
At the same time, these works question the apparent objectivity of photography. Photography is often associated with truth and documentation, yet perception is always shaped by context, perspective, and experience. I am interested in the space where photography begins to approach painting, where the camera seems to exchange roles with brush and pigment, creating images that invite reflection rather than certainty.
5. Across your installations, projections, and photographic works, there is a recurring sense of time being fractured or layered. When you think about the role of time in your work, are you trying to preserve a moment, transform it, or allow it to dissolve into something more fluid?
What does “performance” mean to you?
C: Rather than preserving a moment, I am interested in transforming it. Time in my work is rarely linear.
Photography traditionally captures an instant, but I am interested in what happens when that fixed instant begins to open itself again. Light, movement, memory, and the presence of the viewer continuously reshape the experience of the image. The work remains in a state of becoming rather than closure.
Many of my works explore transitional states—between appearance and disappearance, stillness and movement, body and environment, memory and presence. Ultimately, I am interested in creating spaces in which viewers can experience the fluid nature of perception and existence itself. Rather than fixing reality, the work invites an awareness of change, transformation, and the interconnectedness of image, time, space, and human experience.
Performance, for me, is a time-based performative art practice in which the human body is the central medium. Meaning does not arise through representation, but through the execution of the action itself – in the here and now. Presence, process, and embodied experience are at the core of my work.
