OFFSCREEN Paris, 2026: Antony Cairns

20 - 25 October 2026 
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MaViCa CTY: Tokyo Blue sets a city imagined as the future against a technology that has already become its past. Sony MaViCa cameras, suspended within a floating structure, continuously display Cairns’s photographs of Tokyo. Once imagined as the future of photography, the MaViCa now exists as an obsolete image-making device, caught between camera and screen, object and image. In Cairns’s photographs, Tokyo appears similarly suspended: buildings dissolve into light, architecture becomes abstraction, and the city flickers between presence and memory. Together, camera and city form an afterimage of technological promise - a luminous space where the future has already become history.
 
The presentation is accompanied by the essay Retro-Utopia Foreclosed: Antony Cairn’s MaViCa CTY by Duncan Forbes, Director of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
 

 

Antony Cairns works across photography, installation, and sculpture, exploring the material and technological conditions of image-making. Working with the ambient glow of cities at night, he photographs urban environments including London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Busan, transforming architecture into fractured, luminous abstractions. Cairns treats photography as both image and object, combining analogue processes, experimental printing, and digital interventions. His practice frequently engages obsolete technologies and data carriers, including his ongoing series using recycled IBM punch cards as photographic supports. By repurposing these once-essential technologies, Cairns examines shifting relationships between image, object, archive, and technological progress.

 
Cairns has exhibited internationally at The Photographers’ Gallery, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Tate Modern, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work is held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the George Eastman Museum, and the Archive of Modern Conflict. He is the recipient of the Hariban Award and lives and works in London.

 

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