All images courtesy of Sebastian Kainey.

 A CIRCULAR EXCHANGE
KINGSTON ARTS

31st January-14th March

An exhibition in Kingston's outdoor lightbox gallery, investigating historical communications technologies, drawing from archival images from the State Library of Victoria’s telecommunication archives and photographs taken at the Deutsches Science and Technology Museum in Munich

The photographic series, A Circular Exchange, employs methods of still life photography to mediate between archival images and site photography. At its core, this research has centred on the poetic potential of the politics, technologies, and histories of communications technology—vast and often hidden networks that transmit the flow of global information.

The series draws upon archival materials from the State Library of Victoria’s telecommunication archives alongside photographs taken at the Deutsches Science and Technology Museum in Munich.

Through a methodology of assemblage and still life photography, the work builds a fragmented visual narrative. Optical instruments sit alongside typesetting apparatus, forlorn letter writers appear against cartographic maps, and telegraph tapes emerge as tactile residues of a communications system both mechanical and intimate. These juxtapositions echo the layered ways in which technology mediates human expression, shaping not only how we connect but also how we imagine distance and proximity.

A Circular Exchange invites viewers into a space of reflection, foregrounding infrastructures that usually remain unseen yet structure our everyday lives. Telecommunications cables, telegraph systems, and related technologies are presented not only as technical objects but also as poetic conduits, charged with histories of longing, correspondence, and transmission. A Circular Exchange encourages dialogue about how information circulates, how connections falter or endure, and the imaginative possibilities embedded within the infrastructures that quietly govern our experience of communication.