Cathrine Bublatzky is a media anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Tübingen. She researches diaspora and exile, archives, visual and digital media cultures, photography, art, activism, and the aesthetics and politics of belonging throughout Europe, South Asia and the Middle East. Cathrine authored Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition, a monograph published by Routledge. Her project Contemporary Photography as Cultural Praxis of Iranians in the European Diaspora, which she will continue at global dis:connect, was awarded a scholarship by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation.

During her fellowship at global dis:connect, Cathrine will research a private archive of personal and political photographs from 20th-century Iranian exiles. Assuming that photographs are mobile, constantly connecting and disconnecting times, places and people, Cathrine is concerned with politically sensitive photographs from the archive of an Iranian exiled artist and activist, and the questions of why and how photography functions as a central medium for global communication, information and memory processes as well as identification and belonging in the exiles’ everyday. She inquires how archives and photography contain traces of time and belonging for their audiences in and beyond exile as a cultural field of simultaneously dis:connective and interruptive social interactions.