The rules are clear: A coin toss determines which of the two players will begin. Player one uploads a picture of her choice. Player two responds with a picture of her own, usually within a couple of hours or days. Like a game of ping-pong, the artists pass pictures back and forth that they have either picked out from their archives or created especially for this exercise. When the game began, the artists could neither predict where the journey of images would take them, what themes they would pick up along the way, nor what formal nuances would emerge as the pictures began to interact with one another.

Through a call for entries six female photographers were selected for the PING PONG project by an international jury (Natasha Egan, Karen Fromm, Kateryna Radchenko). In each case, two photographers start a dialogue on a certain topic (public space, portrait, body) using their own images.
The visual ping-pong games are presented in three exhibitions in decentralized locations in different districts of Vienna from June 2019 to June 2020. How do photographs communicate? How do images influence each other? How does the meaning of a photograph change with different conditions of perception? With an extensive outreach program the PING PONG project is trying to encourage discourse on photography as a visual language for young women and girls, cooperating with local initiatives like girls’ cafes and youth centres.

A project by Sophie Haslinger and Corina Lueger with support of SHIFT 3 by Basis.Kultur.Wien.

Three publications with a total of six different covers have been published for the exhibition series.