Contrary to an approach grounded in the still image, Hanako Murakami (1984, Tokyo, Japan) approaches photography less as a technique than as a way of seeing. She explores situations in which vision no longer merely perceives, but acts, alters, displaces.
The works gathered here share a common tension: they highlight alternative modes of image generation?ways of bringing the visible into being that are fundamentally different from known industrial or commercial processes. By deconstructing the conventional frameworks of photography, Murakami sketches a reinvention of the medium, situated between speculation, science, and sensibility.

With Imaginary Landscapes, early twentieth-century photosensitive materials-never used since the time of their manufacture-react upon contact with developer. The images that emerge no longer represent the world; they transform it into autonomous forms, hovering at the threshold of painterly abstraction and inner vision.
In Possibilities (Thermography), it is the heat of objects-rather than light-that becomes the matrix of the image. By reactivating a process conceived in the nineteenth century but quickly abandoned, Murakami outlines here a form of photography that never actually came into being, but could have existed.

Other works explore the transformative powers of vision itself. In the video Burning Gaze, a succession of film excerpts composes a contemporary visual mythology in which the gaze acts as a searing force, traversed by fiction. In Exposure, an electron microscope reveals in real time the effects of light on a sensitive surface: here vision literally inscribes its trace, like an irreversible optical burn. Meanwhile, The Gaze Becomes Gesture overturns the idea of a passive gaze: through an eye-tracking device, a simple cup placed on a table begins to move?set in motion by the viewer's eyes. Seeing becomes doing.

By reactivating forgotten techniques or inventing new interactions through cutting-edge digital devices, Hanako Murakami does not engage in a nostalgic archaeology of the medium. She reinvents photography as gesture, as speculation, as sensitive force, as a way of entering into contact with the real?through an unsuspected poetry capable of opening up a field of possibilities for the visible.