Nachleuchten

Ongoing series

(2023 - present)

Nachleuchten by Anjali Janssens takes the family album as its subject — as a site of collective and individual memory. Working with the family archive, the German-Indian artist turns her gaze toward familiar motifs and reassembles them into poetic visual worlds. Through the interplay of archival and contemporary image material, a multilayered reinterpretation of the classical family album emerges — a visual reflection on origin, memory, and identity.

In Janssens' working process, the archive does not appear as a closed documentation of past family history, but rather as an ongoing narrative: a cross-generational photographic work that the artist continues with her own images. Photographs from various decades of German and Indian family history are thus brought into relation with one another, opening a space in which past and present tell new stories.

Through fragmentary details, recurring motifs, and a cohesive color palette, the viewer's gaze moves from image to image. Inkjet prints are combined with original prints from the family archive, making temporal traces and technical shifts visible on both a conceptual and material level. Nachleuchten invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a luminous visual landscape, in which the album's subjects encounter one another across temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries.

In this way, the images speak not only of the passage of time, but also of the possibility of a continued togetherness within the photographic album.

Nachleuchten — Folkwang Finale im SANAA-Gebäude, Essen, 2025

Nachleuchten — 120 Pages, paperback, German, 2025

Contact

Email: info@anjalijanssens.com
Instagram: @anjalijanssens