Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick’s series, Astres Noirs is a collection of simple abstractions, where light and space evolve into a soulful exchange. It seems incomprehensible that these photographs, which appear so intimate were made simultaneously in cities thousands of miles apart with no connecting correspondence between the makers, as each image radiates magnetically to the other like stars in a constellation.
The works were originally brought together by
Choose Commune who published Astres Noirs, which became an award winning book (2016). This premiere exhibition at
Paris Photo provides the opportunity for Katrin & Protick to purposefully expand and develop this collaboration into a poetic discourse.
Katrin was born in Ruhrgebiet, once the industrial heart of Germany. She relocated to Australia and is now currently based in Melbourne. She is interested in our physical and emotional connection to place, and our relationship to environment. Her work is an inquiry into these themes and has at its core the idea of returning to things.
Protick Sarker is from Dhaka, Bangladesh and primarily works with the medium of light and sound. His practice is grounded in the ideas of time and space. Hovering between the corporeal and meta-physical, Protick’s use of light creates a truth that is more emotional than factual.
"Protick’s use of light as protagonist, combined with deliberate monochromatic arrangements, create a truth that is not factual, but emotional. It is a document only to a suspended reality, where we are in a concurrent state of wake and sleep. In this reality, time is perpetually slowed; and for the first time we are not just looking, but seeing." -- Debra Sacco, Artist
"Much of my work focuses on the everyday and is a play with light, impermanence and ways of seeing."
-- Katrin Koenning
Be sure to visit East Wing's premiere presentation of this stunning work in the Grand Palais for Paris Photo in booth B-33.
www.sarkerprotick.com/
www.katrinkoenning.com/ 
