“Deborah Turbeville: Atmosphere” at piknic

The retrospective exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Atmosphere marks the first time the photographer’s work is on view in a solo exhibition in South Korea. Organized in collaboration with piknic, the exhibition builds on the selection of collages originally presented in Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, curated by Nathalie Hershdorfer for Photo Elysée in 2023.

“Atmosphere” was one of the words Turbeville returned to most often when describing her work. For her, photography was a space in which memory and imagination, past and present could coexist. Throughout her career, she created scenes that felt oddly familiar yet impossible to locate in the real world. Her photographs captured a wide range of places, including rural landscapes on the American East Coast connected to family memories, architecture of St. Petersburg, the Palace of Versailles, and her home in Mexico. Ruined buildings and places bearing the traces of earlier eras became recurring settings in her work. They evoke a sense of longing for worlds that have disappeared, or perhaps never existed at all.

Bringing together Turbeville’s major photographic series and photocollages, the exhibition traces the development of her distinctive visual world and her exploration of the boundary between reality and fiction. It also considers how her experience in fashion, together with her interests in film and literature, shaped a series of interconnected bodies of work. Atmosphere revisits Turbeville’s practice from a contemporary perspective, as her work continues to attract renewed critical and scholarly attention.

In conjunction with the exhibition, two special talks will be held. On Saturday, October 24, the day after the opening, Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, founder of the MUUS Collection, and Richard Grosbard, advisor to the Collection and Director of the Deborah Turbeville Archive, will take part in a conversation on Turbeville’s work and legacy. On Saturday, January 23, 2027, Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of the Photo Elysée, will give a special lecture examining Turbeville’s work and her place in the history of photography.