The artist reflects on photography, collage, and dyed silk as fields of memory, absence, and chromatic transformation.
In ‘Duplo’, Julia Kater shows fourteen new works created between Paris and São Paulo. She explores landscape as a collection of fragments, colours, and memories. By using photography, collage, and dyed silk, Kater builds images that are not fixed, but instead unfold through cutting, layering, and shifts in colour. In her conversation with Brendon Bell-Roberts, Kater discusses how revisiting certain places influences her work, how absence appears in her photographs, and how materials such as collage and textile dyeing generate fresh ideas about what an image can be.
Julia Kater, Photo © Pedrita Junckes
Brendon Bell-Roberts: ‘Duplo’ unfolds fourteen new works that trace your recent research between Paris and São Paulo. How does this dialogue between place and practice inform your evolving relationship to image, surface, and memory?
Julia Kater: They are, in general, places that hold sentimental value, with which I have maintained a relationship over the years and to which I return frequently. It is in these returns that I build my relationship with the landscape. When revisiting these places at different times and seasons, I notice that light, colour, and sensation are transformed, and these variations accumulate in the images. Photography accompanies this movement… It does not fix a place, but records this bond that I gradually build and always revisit.
Julia Kater, Corpo de Pedra (Centauro), 2025. Crédito_ Cortesia da Artista e Simões de Assis.
In your exploration of landscape through photography and collage, each image begins as a fragment, cut and recomposed. How do you think this act of cutting disrupts or redefines our encounter with space and time within the exhibition?
The gesture of cutting, superimposing, and recomposing is part of an understanding of the image as fragment and remnant, something that never presents itself in its entirety. For me, cutting is not just a formal procedure but also a way of placing elements in relation to one another by subtraction, constructing the image from what is missing. This gesture ultimately approaches the idea of testimony not as a totalizing narrative but as an inscription that is always partial. The images are formed by contours, gaps, and overlayings.
The introduction of dyed silk as a support brings colour and texture into an intimate conversation with photographic imagery. How do you understand the tension between textile and photograph as material and conceptual terrain for your work?
This technique interests me deeply because of its similarity to the analogue photographic process, especially the idea of bathing, immersion time, and fixing the image on the surface. When the colour is in the fabric itself, it does not function as an applied layer. It transforms the image completely. The photograph becomes more chromatic, sometimes almost monochromatic, with a predominance of a specific tone.
Installation view. Crédito_ Cortesia da Artista e Simões de Assis.
The introduction of dyed silk as a support brings colour and texture into an intimate conversation with photographic imagery. How do you understand the tension between textile and photograph as material and conceptual terrain for your work?
This technique interests me deeply because of its similarity to the analogue photographic process, especially the idea of bathing, immersion time, and fixing the image on the surface. When the colour is in the fabric itself, it does not function as an applied layer. It transforms the image completely. The photograph becomes more chromatic, sometimes almost monochromatic, with a predominance of a specific tone.
Six of the works in ‘Duplo’ were developed during your residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. How did that experience shape the gestures of layering, chromatic gradation, and atmospheric resonance that we see on the gallery walls?
This exhibition was developed during my residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and it was a very important experience for me. I present new works in fabric, in which I dyed the fabric and then printed the image. These works dialogue with the collages not in the way they represent the landscape, but in their relationship to colour, conceived as a filter that permeates the image.
Julia Kater, díptico da série Palavras-sal, 2025. Crédito Cortesia da Artista e Simões de Assis
There is a poetic oscillation between what is visible and what is implied in your compositions. How do notions of absence, trace, and presence structure your sense of meaning in these newly presented pieces?
Photography always works with both presence and absence. There is what appears inside the frame, and also what is left out. I have always found this an interesting way to think about memory and traces in my work.
Interesting way to think about questions related to memory, presence, and traces.
In a way, this aspect is intensified in my work through the act of cutting. When I separate elements that originally belong to the same field, such as the sky and the sea along the horizon, I disrupt the landscape’s continuity. In that moment, one part begins to exist also in relation to the absence of the other, and the image ceases to function merely as representation, becoming a field of relationships between fragments.
In my fabric works, this appears differently. Often, they are tighter frames that show only a fragment of the image. They function almost like a detail of something much larger, as if the work presents only a portion of a landscape that continues beyond what we see.
Installation view. Crédito_ Cortesia da Artista e Simões de Assis.
Your practice foregrounds colour not merely as addition but as something that emerges from within the work itself. How do you think this internal chromatic logic engages with larger questions about perception and materiality?
The exhibition’s title, ‘Duplo,’ gestures toward multiplicity, reflection, and relation. How do you see duality operating not just formally but conceptually across the works and their interplay with the viewer’s gaze?
At first, ‘Duplo’ meant duplicating the world through photography. But a photo is never an exact mirror; it always shows a limited view. So, any duplication already includes a shift. For me, the ‘double’ is not just mirroring, but something different, never identical to the original. In the exhibition, this appears in the very operations of cutting, approximating, and superimposing images. Fragments from different contexts coexist within the same visual field, creating an unstable duplication of space.
Installation view. Crédito_ Cortesia da Artista e Simões de Assis.
In positioning your photographic collages and prints in dialogue with varied supports and techniques, what conversations do you hope Duplo opens about the limits and possibilities of image-making today?
For me, working with collage already implies thinking of the image as something constructed. Each photograph begins as a fragment, cut out and removed from its original context. When these fragments are brought together, the image no longer corresponds to a single time or place and begins to exist as a composition.
In silk works, this construction becomes even more evident because colour begins to permeate the image. It functions not only as a background but also as something that alters how the photograph appears.
What interests me is precisely that moment when the image ceases to be something fixed and
becomes more permeable.
The exhibition is on view at the Simões de Assis Alameda Lorena, São Paulo, Brazil, until March 14th 2026.
