At Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Lehnert & Landrock – Revisiting a Colonial Archive confronts the Orientalist photographs of Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock with new works by Gloria Oyarzabal and Nouf Aljowaysir. The exhibition reopens a colonial image archive to question how its staged visions of North Africa persist today: in museums, mass media and even AI‑driven image systems.
The exhibition takes Photo Elysée’s historical Lehnert & Landrock holdings—postcards and photographs made for a European market in early‑20th‑century Tunisia and Cairo—and turns them into a case study of how images participate in colonial power. Rather than presenting these pictures as neutral documents, the show traces their production, circulation and afterlives, making visible the commercial and ideological frameworks that shaped what could be seen.
Within this context, contemporary interventions open the archive up to critical rereading. Gloria Oyarzabal engages the museum’s collection to probe how institutions frame colonial material today, using her work to unsettle the apparent transparency of documentary photography. Nouf Aljowaysir extends this questioning into the present, linking the racialised and gendered stereotypes in the archive to the biases of contemporary AI systems and datasets, showing how historical images continue to inform machine vision and algorithmic imaginaries.
