BUT I WORLD I SEE YOU*

As part of the larger context of the Triennial of Photography, the exhibition BUT I | WORLD | I SEE | YOU  will present works by 40 international transgenerational artists. They all are identifying folds in the content of photographs: the details that reveal something about a picture, each time unfolding the historical sediments.

The exhibition’s opening chapter will decipher (sepulchral) landscapes imbued with historical memories and informed by personal experience, myth, and ideology, or how significance affects the images’ overall latent meanings. It will present photographs such as Henry Fox Talbot’s The Haystack (1844) with a leaning ladder; Henri Becquerel’s scientific images Phosphorescences invisibles and Beta Ray; an image of a ladder and a sentry blown and imprinted on a wall by the flash of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; Hiromi Tsuchida’s Camphor Tree 700 meters from the epicentre; On Kawara’s Thanatophanies; Santu Mofokeng’s trauma or polluted landscapes where human and geographical bodies are forced to undergo a gradual metamorphosis; and Jo Ractliffe’s Terreno Ocupado and As Terras do Fim do Mundo of Angola’s landscapes and leftovers, among others works.

The haystack—a campaign recitative—reveals the very regime of appearance of objects whose vertigo Duchamp’s ready-mades will accomplish, for there is a kinship between ready-mades and photography that is both obvious and obfuscated. The exhibition’s second chapter will explore how artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers, Witkacy, Gustav Metzger, Dieter Roth, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Emilio Prini, Fischli & Weiss, Aglaia Konrad, and Saher Shah use drop shadows, optical devices, and photographic appropriation to record the states of forms and to serve as a matrix, a constitutive vehicle for the organization of ideas, for an ecology of attention. 

The exhibition’s third and closing chapter will concentrate on protocols, image treatment, and the production of objects of historical and poetic evocation—or how artists investigate and translate constitutive gestures, photographic or archeological material, and artifacts within their own practice—that establish new relationships with memory, intimacy, and the archive. By tracing, activating, and entwining sources, the artists question the status of the image and »reinterpret what art does or what makes art« (Jacques Rancière). In proposing embodied and emotional experiences where aesthetics and politics are indissociable, their artworks render visible the interplay between colonial histories and the present day, labor and traditions, and documents and imagination. With artists Tina Modotti, Bahman Jalali, Hannah Darabi, Akram Zaatari, Sigmar Polke, Karimah Ashadu, Mario García Torres, Yeh Shih-Chiang, Yeh Wei-Li, Saâdane Afif, Rosa Barba, and Khadija Saye, among others.

The Hamburger Kunsthalle will also collaborate with the Kampnagel International Summer Festival 2026 with the presentation of Nan Goldin’s iconic slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency from the museum’s collection and performances by dancer and choreographer Xavier Le Roy.

List of artists to be confirmed.
 

Curator

• Dr. Corinne Diserens

Assistant Curator

• Leona Marie Ahrens