Orbiting Lucia, 2022

site specific installation built for “Refracting Histories” at the Museum of Contemporary of Photography, Chicago

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Orbiting Lucia (2022) manifests the weight of Lucia Moholy’s (under recognized) co-authorship with her husband Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Lucia (1894-1989) co-authored the photogram, amongst other contributions to photographic theory and practice. Her  proof of their work together is articulated in a single paragraph in her 1972 essay, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy/Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes.

Sonja Thomsen created an immersive space in the MoCP stairwell that is a tribute to Lucia Moholy, whose career was overshadowed by her once husband, Bauhaus educator László Moholy-Nagy. Thomsen works with reproductions of Moholy’s photographs, cropping sections to emphasize imagery of hands across different generations to underscore unacknowledged labor and care provided by women. She places images within varying levels of light, which fluctuate in the installation depending on where one stands. Looking up, a mobile titled and manner of our collaboration (2022) recalls an apostrophe, the punctuation of possession. Thomsen invites us to reconstruct Moholy’s fragmented legacy and to question our modes of access to information by animating the link between the known and the unknown.   – Kristin Taylor,  Curator of Academic Programs & Collections, Museum of Contemporary Photography

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"When reading passages from those early writings, I still feel the process of their formation reverberate in my mind. I am quite used to this." Lucia Moholy 1972

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