Science Class 2015

Curator: This photograph by Elina Brotherus, titled *Science Class,* was created in 2015. It's a C-print photograph that initially evokes a sense of stillness, almost melancholy, wouldn't you say? Editor: Absolutely. My first thought went to the clinical environment depicted. The harsh lighting, utilitarian surfaces…it speaks volumes about institutional spaces and the labour they contain. All those glass vessels and vials—the trace of experiments or preparations—the human presence appears staged in a factory for the cultivation of knowledge. Curator: Exactly. And the woman in the photograph, holding what appears to be two petri dishes up to the light, is that her, Brotherus? I am intrigued by how the scientific tools are rendered delicate, vulnerable somehow. She is searching… peering intensely through the glass. I wonder if the photograph touches on themes of observation and objectivity itself. It's like an updated version of Vermeer’s paintings; science in our own time. Editor: Well, and what of the setting, then? The worn laboratory furniture, the aging walls. These speak to me about education and training as industrial activity, in all of its material reality. It makes one wonder where the photo was shot. An educational setting? Or a disused medical building? Brotherus' art raises questions about what materials and physical infrastructure support knowledge production, or even halt progress in some cases. Curator: True! There’s a palpable sense of the past mingling with the present; the woman's vintage-style dress amidst the laboratory apparatus only intensifies that temporal tension, don’t you think? The light, too! It isn't kind or soft—it speaks to the difficult things of learning and coming to know, really investigating. I appreciate the simplicity; it reminds me of revisiting something both familiar and unknowable, perhaps like the quest of science itself. Editor: For me, the key to grasping it is by tracing Brotherus’ material reality, rather than getting mired in abstraction. It's fascinating how this simple image creates space for thinking about our complicated relationship to science—as labor, as production, as spectacle. It underscores what we lose when educational facilities lack appropriate resources or attention. Curator: Yes, I leave the photograph thinking how we each interpret "material"—either physically present objects, like what we've observed in *Science Class,* or, something to come to grasp.