Folkwang Photo Talk with Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

28.4.2026

We are very much lookoing forward to welcoming Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert for this summer term’s first Folkwang Photo Talk. She will speak about

AI and Speculative Archives: The Archive of Grigoris Antoniou

This presentation examines the artwork »The Archive of Grigoris Antoniou« which was commissioned by the Hasselblad Foundation for the exhibition Bugs and Metamorphosis in 2025. It is a speculative archive created partly with AI technology by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achilleos. Grigoris Antoniou (c. 1849–1940) was a Cypriot foreman involved in archaeological excavations during colonial-era Cyprus whose contributions to archaeology were pivotal but have been largely overlooked by hegemonic historical narratives. The artwork consists of 40 lantern slides (ambrotypes) and a 13-minute film.

The images on the lantern slides include mostly AI-generated visuals and some »re-framed« archival photographs, blurring or glitching the line between fiction and reality. The film follows an archivist at a museum who is documenting the processes of cataloguing, preserving, contextualizing, identifying, and storing this fictional collection of lantern slides. The archivist enlists the assistance of a »Museum Bot« to interpret the archival materials, though this occasionally leads to conflicting information and unexpected glitches. In general, the work critically examines archival practices and the complex intersections between colonial photographic records and AI.

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is an artist/researcher whose work explores photography, museums, archives and new technologies. She is professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology. For the academic year 2025–2026, she is the Moa Martinson Visiting Professor at Linköping University, where she is completing a monograph titled »Reframing Photography: Photography, Archives and Colonial Cyprus« which will be piublished by Bloomsbury press, alongside the production of new artwork.

The talk will take place on April 28, 2026 at 6 pm CEST (5 pm BST or 12 pm EST). As always, the first of three talks in our lecture series is online and via Zoom. Please inquire here for the link!