Guest Room: Claus Gunti & Visvaldas Morkevičius

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. For this edition, art historian, curator, and professor at ECAL Claus Gunti and visual artist Visvaldas Morkevičius propose the theme "Seeing with Emotions".

Looking at images on social media – scrolling through ASMR accounts, images of warfare, food porn, and TikTok trends – often triggers overlapping, frequently paradoxical emotional responses, and a generally dark mood. Joy, expectation, satisfaction, disgust, indignation: all are channeled within our scrolling habits and monetized. Filter bubbles and algorithms artificially reinforce communities and beliefs that grow increasingly dissociated from "reality." Images are less and less credible, as AI slop and templated content flood our feeds. Making sense of the world, in this context of engineered attention economies and the proliferation of formatted social media content, has become increasingly complex.

This Guest Room open call aims to explore this context through the works of artists focused on the one thing we can claim to be real in our lives: our emotions. In the wake of the affective turn, artists have recently focused increasingly on our emotional states, addressing ways of seeing, reacting, and coping from an individual perspective. The topic is intentionally broad – we are looking for any type of project engaging with emotional responses, care, coping mechanisms, intimacy, relationships with others, or reflective practices, which deal with these attempts to make sense of the world through what we feel.

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 Claus Gunti

Claus Gunti is an art historian, curator, and educator based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Teaching photography history and theory at the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL), he is interested in how technology shapes our ways of seeing — and in how artists question, challenge, and respond to these transformations, most recently through the lens of emotion and affect. He works collaboratively by inclination, building projects through shared authorship, dialogue, and collective thinking. Co-founder of Superscripte, a series of texts on contemporary photography, he is also launching Sludge, a new offspace in Lausanne, which investigates the link between “reality” and digital infrastructure.

About Visvaldas Morkevičious

Visvaldas Morkevičius is a Lithuanian artist working with photography and its expanded field. His practice explores the psychological and emotional conditions of contemporary life, focusing on identity, technology, and systems of power. He completed an MA in Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne in 2025. Drawing on critical theory and media philosophy, his work examines how digital environments, war, and information systems shape perception, behaviour, and agency. Through a minimal yet layered visual language, he constructs narratives that merge personal experience with broader socio-political dynamics, addressing mediated violence, displacement, and techno-feudal control.

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.