Mitarbeiter und Freunde 1988

Hanne Darboven created this artwork, “Mitarbeiter und Freunde,” which translates to "Employees and Friends", and it's made up of rows of black and white photographs paired with handwritten notes. I imagine Darboven collecting these images, each one a little window into a moment shared among people. The photos are like tiny stage sets. You start to feel like she is building a kind of archive, a way to think about time, memory, and the relationships that shape our lives. I wonder about the stories behind each picture, and how they connect to the text below. It's like she's trying to capture something that's both personal and universal. Darboven reminds us that art-making is a form of thinking, a way to make sense of the world through repetition, variation, and the accumulation of details.