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Niki Hoi is a visual artist, director, photographer, and writer based in Germany. She has worked across interdisciplinary contexts, including publications, theatres, NGOs, museums, and cultural festivals. Her practice explores memory, identity, and intergenerational narratives through documentary, fiction, and photographic approaches.

Her ongoing research focuses on the Macau diaspora, with a particular interest in archival materials and experimental fiction. Through autoethnographic and anthropological methods, she reflects on family histories, gender expectations, and cultural memory, where personal narratives intersect with broader social and historical contexts.


Doppelära as a Concept in Photography

Doppelära is derived from German words, Doppel (double) and evokes Ära (era), suggesting a duality of time. It is inspired by my late father’s photographic practice and an analog film he labelled as unfinished, and left behind from many years ago. Some of the film was exposed, yet never developed. Encountering these images for the first time, I ponder what it means for photographs to wait, and in the waiting, the meaning of the moment changes.

I understand photography as a medium that always holds two temporalities: the instant an image is taken and the moment it is perceived. Photographs do not simply record time; they accumulate it. I had left an undeveloped film behind at home when I went on a solo trip; I reactivated it by using double exposure when I returned. I did not know what the overlay would have exposed. I unintentionally layered images from before and after 2019, the latter spanning the pandemic era. These overlapping frames showcase how personal memory and collective history collide, revealing social change through visual accumulation rather than linear narration.

The interpretation of photographs always remains fluid between individuals, cultures and times. As time passes, photographs continue to evolve, shaped by the distance between the image and the viewer. Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography that no one can ever understand photographs of his mother the way he does, because for him the photograph is not merely an image—it is her. In this sense, I use Doppelära as a concept to reflect on the intimacy that photographs carry yet cannot fully disclose. By being aware of the gap between different times within the photographs, emotions, memories, and losses across time can emerge, and they are no longer limited to one moment.