Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 presents ninth version

Alliance, Infinity, Love—within the Face of the Other
June 5–September 22, 2026

The ninth Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 presents eleven exhibitions in eight famend museums and artwork establishments in Hamburg, Germany. The worldwide pageant, below the inventive route of London-based Mark Sealy, celebrates the significance of images in our time and demonstrates that it could do greater than merely observe: images can join individuals and encourage reflection on justice, duty and humanity.

The theme of the ninth Triennial is: Alliance, Infinity, Love—within the Face of the Other. These three guiding ideas kind the frequent thread operating by way of all eleven exhibitions and invite guests to maneuver past the mere contemplation of images and grow to be lively members in a shared cultural expertise.

The central exhibition Alliance, Infinity, Love—within the Face of the Other, curated by Mark Sealy, can be on view at Deichtorhallen Hamburg’s Hall for Contemporary Art. It addresses the pageant’s central theme and celebrates the cultural and inventive variety of images, its therapeutic and transformative energy. It presents over 30 inventive positions spanning images, video and movie, which inform of various locations and cultural experiences. With works from Hélène Amouzou, Sandra Brewster, Didier Ben Loulou, Mario Cravo Neto, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lee Jaffe, Teresa Margolles, Mónica de Miranda, Tyler Mitchell, Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop, Inuuteq Storch, Matthew Thorne and Derik Lynch, Nil Yalter and others.

The time period Alliance stands for solidarity and collective motion, as exemplified by the exhibition Franki Raffles. Photography, Activism, Campaign Works on the Museum of Work. Raffles, a British photographer, positioned the working realities of ladies within the Seventies and Eighties on the focus of her social documentary work and used images as a software to fight injustice.

Resonating Images from Peru at MARKK—Museum am Rothenbaum World Cultures and Arts takes the historic images and audio recordings from the nation’s colonially formed previous, created by the German beginner researcher Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848–1928), as a place to begin. Contemporary students and artists from Peru reinterpret the historic paperwork and rework them right into a residing archive.

The solo exhibition Whispers by Melike Kara on the Kunsthaus Hamburg additionally engages with the theme of Alliance. In a large-scale set up Kara displays on her Kurdish heritage, which she has researched, archived and explored. The focus lies on questions of id, reminiscence and therapeutic.

Hamburger Kunsthalle’s exhibition BUT I WORLD I SEE YOU* (*Rémy Zaugg) gives a philosophical and historic grounding for the exploration of images, movies and artifacts knowledgeable by private expertise, delusion and beliefs. Across its three sections, the exhibition meditates on landscapes of reminiscence, the transformations of kind, and the poetic and political cost of the archive.

Under the time period Infinity, images is known as a medium that doesn’t merely symbolize actuality, however opens up views that join previous, current and future. In the exhibition Care. Reconsidering Photography on the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Sara Sallam explores how colonial photos proceed to exert their affect. Drawing on examples from the museum’s archaeological and photographic assortment, she develops counter-narratives that problem colonial histories and invite extra compassionate encounters with the previous.

In her first institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Nina Porter experiments with new pictorial kinds, mixing images and sculpture. Her most up-to-date work troubles the dynamic between digicam, topic and picture.

The exhibition Inner Mornings, or Forms of Counterculture at Falckenberg Collection, which takes the work of Surrealist photographer and author Claude Cahun as its level of departure, presents inventive resistance as a steady course of. With works from Halil Altındere, Maja Bajevic, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Valie Export, Fischli & Weiss, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler and others.

The focus of the third thematic discipline— Love —is the human. PHOXXI—Temporary House of Photography presents two up to date positions, Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah and Abdulhamid Kircher, that have interaction experimentally and spatially with analogue color images, activating its emotional frequencies. Photography is made tangible right here as a medium of proximity, whereas on the identical time being pushed to its materials limits.

With Cocktail Prolongé: F.C. Gundlach Special, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg current works from the gathering of F.C. Gundlach, the influential style photographer and founding father of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, together with Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Hans Bellmer, Larry Clark, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn and Cindy Sherman.

The Bucerius Kunst Forum presents F.C. Gundlach’s work as a dialogue between style, individuals and society. The exhibition You’ll Never Watch Alone reveals Gundlach as networker, photographer, collector and patron. The exhibition takes Gundlach’s work as a place to begin to light up the emergence of images as a visible tradition, its related milieu, and the relevance of images for social actions.

The ninth Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 stands for a brand new understanding of visibility. Photography reveals that each gaze carries duty. In a world formed by battle, this Triennial’s purpose is to replicate on the advanced nature of humanity and to convey us nearer collectively in our understanding of one another by way of signposting acts of solidarity, openness and insistence on our skill to like.

Photo: Şirin Şimşek.