Out of Focus brings together anthropological and artistic projects that challenge dominant modes of seeing, listening, sensing, knowing, and narrating. Across film, photography, sound, installation, performance, app design, and multiple modalities, the exhibition explores how blurriness, fragmentation, and participation can become tools for resistance, care, and shared meaning-making.  From feminist co-curation to decolonial archives and critical app design, each contribution questions what is centered, what is left out of frame, and how we might create commons through uncertainty.

The exhibition centers on the idea of un/commoning: a movement where certain narratives, images, and media practices help build communities of resistance and care, while others reinforce exclusion, hierarchies, and control. By working with blurred visuals, sounds, broken archives, participatory formats, performance and open-source tools, contributors resist the demand for clarity and control. Instead, they invite the audience into spaces of uncertainty, tension, and co-creation. Thus, the exhibition “Out of Focus” is an invitation to dwell in uncertainty, to look differently, and to imagine otherwise.

Through the curatorial project, we ask: Can we use the “out of focus” to shift attention away from extractive practices and towards collective ways of knowing? Can we turn curatorial spaces into commons, sites of shared care, critique, and possibility?

As part of the GASCA-Conference 2025 in Cologne, the Working Group Media(anthropology) curated the exhibition ›Out of Focus‹ for selected intervention spaces in and with the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. From Tuesday, September 30th to Thursday, Oct 2^nd, 22 selected works are on display at various locations in the museum. On Wednesday, Oct 1st, 2025, there will be an exhibition reception and movement activation.

Contributions