On Vanishing The subject of 'disappearance' is being interpreted with an entirely open approach and examined from the most diverse points of view: from questions on the materiality and aesthetics of the photographic in the digital age and the timeless poetry of abstract pictorial forms, the arc spans to political and socio-ecological dimensions, where social utopias and the promises of a globalized economy are brought into alignment with the factual reality and its temporality.

With an understanding of the urban space as a place where the social and the economic overlap, for her extensively researched, serial image cycle MLK Blvd. (Martin-Luther-King Boulevard) (2015) Peggy Buth makes use of a direct, undistorted but still subjective image language and creates a 'visibility' which frees the geographically and temporally specific situation, and its associated connotations, from its historical attributes. With the visual maelstrom a connection is made between the 'tale' of the failed utopias and social experiments of the last century and the current discussions around commodification of living conditions, around marginalization, around revaluation and suppression in the context of turbo-gentrification in the capitols of the world, and around the advancing division of globalized societies.

Alternating between fiction, narration, and documentation, Sven Johne approaches general and highly subjective topics of our time with humor and subversiveness: the question of self-optimization, specific fear of exclusion and failure, the search for individual fulfilment and the promise of a better, fairer world. A specific interest lies in looking into areas and situations that could be called 'model regions', where the effects of the 'neoliberal turn' of the last decades are becoming more and more visible. I wonder what's in those containers' (2023) asks a simple and obvious question. We catch sight of the massive accumulation of overseas containers – the tectonics of a world economy that has come to a temporary almost-standstill under the burning glass. In a text module – commentary and picture section in equal measure – the distortions and abysses that lie behind the surfaces of the pictures are revealed in Johne's very own language between laconic description and poetic intensification.

"Poet-photographer"... this pairing of terms probably most aptly describes the approach and œuvre of American artist Erica Baum. Fascinated by the printed word, concrete poetry, and the beauty of language permeating our daily lives, she develops her photographic works in the tension between text and image. Her works are 'photographic' in a very specific fashion: alongside the fleeting and ephemeral quality of the 'visual overload' on our displays, she places an object-like presence and a precise interest in the material context of photography. The secret-language-like puzzles of basic graphical modules of her series Piano Rolls (2008) translate, when perforated into paper and read by a self-playing piano, as a lead sheet, an operating system for music. these poetic and concrete photographs show a semantic system, a loose narrative that is not readable for the human eye, but printed sound, ultimately functioning as the image itself and speaking to multilayered forms of translatability.

For many years, Adrian Sauer has been dealing in manifold ways with the medial characteristics of digital images in particular, questioning the fundamental problems of imaging and perception – of analog and digital realities. As a consequence, he conveys an independent, new understanding of the concept of photography. The work 256 Graustufen (2021) refers to the capacity of digital photography to depict exactly 256 shades between black and white. These 256 possibilities are the archetype of image computing: additive process, visual composition, and the apparently endless layering of chromatic abstraction. Working with this media-analytical approach, all the works shown have a formal and thematic quality that is also expressed in the specific form of presentation - direct, reportage-like techniques alternate with the image-making of classic studio practice or even completely digitally generated image worlds.