Apollonia by Karin Apollonia Müller
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#mixedmedia
I first met Karin Apollonia Müller around the time of the The August Sander 10K Collection, a landmark NFT release launched by Julian Sander in February 2022. At the time, it felt like one of the first major moments where photography truly started making waves within the NFT space and opened new conversations around photographic art in the digital era. Coming from German backgrounds while both living abroad, we quickly connected through a shared interest in how photography can exist beyond institutions and become part of everyday life and personal routine.
In her latest body of work, Apollonia turns that exploration inward. Centered around the origins and mythology surrounding her middle name “Apollonia,” the series moves between personal history, Greek mythology, photography, found imagery, and artificially generated material. Rather than approaching mythology as something fixed or distant, she treats it as a living archive — one that continues to echo through contemporary image-making and identity.
Interview
Your project begins with a name, your name. At what moment did “Apollonia” stop being just a personal inheritance and become an artistic investigation?
“Apollonia” began as something inherited, my aunt and godmother’s first name, passed down before I could choose it. For many years, I carried it almost unconsciously.
My early work was focused on the relationship between human beings and landscape, on questions of origin and belonging. Over time, this focus turned towards me.
What also struck me was that my name Apollonia derives from the god Apollo, who, according to mythology, was born on Delos, an island surrounded by the sea. I grew up on a riverboat on the Rhine with my father, a captain, and my mother. There is a connection to water here that feels less biographical than elemental, almost like an inaudible presence running through everything. This resonance became the initial point of departure for the project.
In Greek mythology, Apollo is associated with light, prophecy, and artistic creation — themes that also resonate deeply within photography. How does photography allow you to explore or reinterpret these mythological ideas, both in a broader sense and through your personal research into the name “Apollonia”?
Light forms the material foundation of every photographic image. For me, however, light has never been only a technical condition. It functioned rather as a carrier of something that resists full visibility, something unsayable.
From this perspective, I began to understand photography less as a medium of clarity or pure representation, and more as a space of projection and uncertainty. In this sense, it comes close to mythological thinking. Mythology does not seek to rationally explain the world, it produces images and narratives for what cannot be fully grasped.
I also find the idea of prophecy important here. Like an oracle, images resist definitive interpretation. This indeterminacy is, for me, one of the most productive aspects of photographic practice. It suspends the demand for fixed meaning and opens instead a space of projection and imagination. And the aspect of artistic creation is closely tied to vision.
I then also believe that names carry invisible histories, that shape perception long before they are consciously understood. In that sense, the work is not about illustrating mythology, but about tracing how myth continues to operate quietly within contemporary experience through image, language, memory and projection.
I am out with lanterns looking for myself.
– Emily Dickson
The series combines your own photographs, found imagery, and artificially created material. What has been most interesting for you in exploring and merging these three different forms of visual expression within one body of work?
I was interested in bringing these different forms of imagery into a shared visual space and allowing them to enter into dialogue with one another.
By combining my own photographs, found imagery, and artificially generated material, different layers of reality begin to overlap personal experience, collective memory, and synthetic construction. The boundaries between them begin to blur. The images no longer function as separate entities, but begin to influence, reflect and transform one another.
Coming from documentary photography, I was originally interested in the image as evidence. Over time, this certainty became increasingly unstable. This work moves toward a more fluid understanding of images as carriers of fantasy and desire, while exploring the relationality of reception, facticity, and possibility.
What emerges is an open field in which images constantly reconfigure one another. What I am concerned with is less defining what is real than observing how meaning is produced through shifting systems of perception.
The figure of Apollo historically also represents order, beauty, and clarity. Does your work embrace these ideals, or does it also reveal their shadows and contradictions?
I am drawn to these ideals, but not in a celebratory sense. What interests me is the fragility beneath notions of order, beauty, and clarity, the moment in which they begin to dissolve and reveal their own contradiction.
In the Apollonia Project, the name carries this mythological weight, but I understand it less as an ideal than as a shifting field in which identity is continuously formed and reformed.
Rather than approaching clarity as certainty, the work moves toward ambiguity, illusion and ephemerality. It asks what remains when preexisting images and narratives begin to fracture, and how meaning persists within that instability.
There is a tension in the project between intimacy and universality — your own history becoming symbolic of something larger. How personal is this work for you emotionally?
The work is personal, but not confessional. I am not interested in exposing private experience, but in using what is close to me as a point of departure for something larger.
Intimacy here is less about revelation than proximity. The project begins with my own history, but gradually opens into a wide field where personal memory overlaps with collective structures of perception, language, and myth.
What interests me is this movement, when something personal begins to resonate beyond itself, without losing its origin or pre-existing images.
When Leto gave birth to you,
the commanding one, King Apollo,
While her dainty arm
wrapped tightly around the palm,
Of all immortals fairest,
on the rounded shore,
Then Delos was filled all around,
the endless plain,
Full of ambrosial fragrance,
the huge earth laughed,
And loudly rejoiced the
sea’s gray waves in the bottom.
– Theognis von Megara,
Trinklieder, in: translated by Mörike,
1804-1875, Lyrik, 34
Artificially created imagery introduces a contemporary layer into an ancient narrative. How do you see AI or synthetic image-making changing our relationship to myth, authorship, and truth?
For a long time, mythology served as a way for humanity to explain the world, to give form to what could not yet be understood. The gods functioned as projections of human fears, desires, and uncertainties, making invisible forces imaginable.
Later, science took on this role offering systems through which reality could be described and ordered.
And perhaps AI is now beginning to take on a similar position not as mythology in the traditional sense, but as a new kind of framework through which we attempt to access, understand and organize the world.
In searching for Apollonia, did you ultimately discover more about the mythology itself, or more about your own identity as an artist?
Through this project, I encountered mythology as something both historical and strangely present.
During my research, I came across the Grave Naiskos of Apollonia (c. 100 BC) at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. The project starts with an inverted detail from the shoulder of Saint Apollonia, where the form for me mirrors Mount Vesuvius, a threshold into the Greco Roman world that still shapes Western perception today. The journey progresses to Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, and my connection to the sea.
From there, we enter the world of gods, symbolized by Saint Apollonia’s dove, which rises towards the heavens—the ideal world—but, like all creatures, cannot reach it, ultimately falling back into the cage, as Plato’s allegory of the cave suggests The pomegranate, another recurring motif, refers to Persephone’s descent into the underworld and to the condition of existing bound between light and darkness, freedom and captivity.
Over time, I realized the project was not only about mythology, but also about a longing for an ideal I could never fully visualise within documentary practice, only suggest through a specific quality of light. In this sense, the work also became a liberation from my documentary background and from the idea of photographing the world as it appears.
Formally, the project shifts toward a more experimental visual language, moving between perception, imagination and construction. It allows me to create an imaginary space in which questions of identity and origin could be continuously reconfigured.
So perhaps what I ultimately discovered is neither mythology nor myself separately, but a mediated space in which both begin to overlap, without the need for direct self-representation.
Artist Bio
Karin Apollonia Müller studied photography and film at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, Germany, where she received a Masters degree with honors in photography and film in 1992. Since 1995, she has lived in California and Europe, teaching and participating in residencies in China, New Mexico, Italy, California and Germany. She received a DAAD grant for American Samoa and Los Angeles, a Thomas Mann fellowship in Santa Monica, Los Angeles and a Getty Commission, Los Angeles, a Lannan foundation residency among others.
Her work has been placed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, Los Angeles among others. She published three monographs, „Angels in Fall by Kruse Publisher; „On Edge“ by Nazraeli Press; Timbercove by Nazraeli Press.
Photographer: Karin Apollonia Müller
X: @_KAMPhotography
Instagram: @apollonia_mueller
Photos copyright Karin Apollonia Müller