Guest Room: Amin Yousefi & Danit Ariel

Guest Room is Der Greif's online exhibition format featuring open submissions curated by leading figures in contemporary photography. It is designed to foster collaboration, spark creative exchange, and amplify new voices in visual culture under a given theme. Curated by Amin Yousefi and Danit Ariel from Photoworks this edition invites artists to reflect on “A Door is Not a Border”.

Domestic space has long accommodated forms of intimacy, expression, and collective life that are constrained or prohibited in public. These experiences help us consider domestic space as something continually produced through the relationships between bodies, their surroundings, and the conditions under which they live. 

Across different parts of the world, domestic spaces are becoming increasingly unstable under political, social, and environmental pressures. War and forced displacement have made the boundary between private and public life uncertain, while state intervention and changing legal conditions reach into the organisation of everyday domestic relations. These conditions have different histories and consequences, but each reveals how the continuity of domestic life depends upon forces beyond the control of those who inhabit it.

Photography occupies a particular position within this tension. Images made in domestic environments record relationships and gestures that may have been possible precisely because they remained outside public view. Their subsequent circulation introduces another form of exposure, while photographs of interiors may also preserve traces of ways of living that political or historical circumstances have since made impossible.

For this Guest Room, we invite photographic works that investigate the instability of domestic space and its relationship to the political and social conditions of our time. We are interested in how these conditions transform the experience of inhabiting a space, the freedoms exercised within it, and the forms of resistance that emerge when domestic life can no longer be taken for granted

Please note: Images which have been selected for a previous Der Greif opportunity are not eligible for re-submission. We want to support the broadest range of photographers possible and therefore encourage you to submit work that has not yet been selected by our past Guest Curators. Any images which do not comply with these terms will be removed from the selection process.

Why submit to Guest Room?

• Be discovered by experts in contemporary art and photography
• Get published in an online showcase on Der Greif alongside emerging artists from all over the world
• Win an online feedback session with the curators

Voluntary donation

Der Greif is a registered non-profit. In these challenging economic times – especially for arts organizations and artists – we are convinced to provide a vital platform for our community. If you're in the position to support this mission, we value your support.

Since launching Guest Room in January 2015, we've invited a broad range of professionals (gallerists, editors, curators) to create opportunities for artists to share their work and get it in front of an international network they might not have access to otherwise. We are more committed than ever to continue this work.

We suggest a voluntary 10€ donation to help us sustain these efforts. If you'd like to support us further, we also accept regular donations via our Raisely page.

If you're unable to contribute financially, please email voucher-guestroom@dergreif.org to receive a 50% or 100% discount code. Your artistic and financial contributions enable our continued growth.

About Amin Yousefi

Amin Yousefi is an artist, curator and writer based in London. He is Assistant Curator at Photoworks and Editor of Photography+. Across photography, archives and moving images, his practice examines how images enter historical narratives, acquire the status of evidence, and change meaning through reproduction and circulation. Yousefi considers the power relations between photographer, photographed subject and viewer. He has written for Aperture,Foam Magazine, Photoworks Annual and C4 Journal. He received the C/O Berlin Artist Award in 2026, was a Foam Talent in 2024 and received the Royal Photographic Society's Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography.

About Danit Ariel

Danit Ariel is an artist, writer and curator, whose practice looks into how art can create new ways of meeting. She is the author of “Nayah: Empathy as an Act of Resistance” which explores the role of gender in practices of empathy; and “All the Tables are Brown”, looking more specifically at language as both a bridge and barrier between communities. As Photoworks' curator, she mentors artists, develops opportunities for practitioners and audiences to engage with photography, and curates exhibitions nationally and internationally.

About Der Greif Guest Room

Guest Room is a monthly online exhibition with open submissions curated in real-time by personalities from the international photography scene. Der Greif is an award-winning organization for contemporary photography. It is print-publication, online-publication, curatorial team and joint project all at once. Der Greif connects the digital and the analogue, exploring and expanding the borders and limits of image-distribution and -reception in the digital era.