News

This year’s Photography Festival of the Aachen City Region presents the dual exhibition “Alliances. Photographs by Arno Fischer and Jordis Antonia Schlösser”, featuring black-and-white works by both photographers at Burg Frankenberg, curated by Nina Mika-Helfmeier.

Berlin in the 1950s — a city in transition — captured by Arno Fischer. Havana in the 1990s — also a city in a state of flux — photographed by Jordis Antonia Schlösser. Both perspectives on urban life and its people reflect a deep interest in interpersonal relationships and human situations, marked by a shared sensitivity and observational empathy.

Jordis Antonia Schlösser studied under Arno Fischer at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund in the 1990s. During that time, she created the body of work featured in this exhibition: “No es fácil – Havana Between Times.” This widely acclaimed photo essay portrays a country caught in limbo, shaped by hope and anxiety about the future. Arno Fischer, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 84, is regarded as one of the most important German photographers of the 20th century. Alongside his well-known images of divided Berlin, the exhibition also features a selection of his travel photographs.

Exhibition dates: August 24 – September 21, 2025

Artist Talk & Exhibition Tour with the Photographer: September 20, 2025, 6:00 PM

Workshops with the Photographer: September 19 and 20, 2025

Venue: Burg Frankenberg, Aachen

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The 30th edition of the ongoing Noorderlicht Photo Biennale explores the complex relationship between technology, ecology, and cultural heritage. Rapid technological progress has had profound effects on biodiversity, social structures, and our shared history. The biennale aims to raise awareness and spark dialogue: How does technology shape our lives, our landscapes, and our collective memory?

In keeping with these questions, the festival presents the project “Internet Explorers” by photographer Heinrich Holtgreve in collaboration with radio journalist Moritz Metz. Since early 2022, Holtgreve and Metz have traveled around Germany together — equipped with camera and microphones — visiting every physical site where the country is connected to its neighbors via fiber-optic cables. The first result of this journey was a podcast in which they share both their on-site experiences and technical insights.

Exhibition dates: until September 7, 2025

Venue: Niemeyerfabriek, Paterswoldseweg 43, 9726 BB Groningen

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In Jamlitz, a place steeped in history, Harald Hauswald presents a selection of his striking photographs from the GDR in the exhibition "On Disappearance."
The exhibition is part of a temporary public art project, in which all contributions engage with the town and its people. Hauswald’s photographs bring everyday life in the GDR back into the present — authentic and accessible, right in the heart of the Brandenburg countryside.

Under the title "Identity and Memory," the accompanying program invites visitors to open table talks. In a relaxed setting, the participating artists introduce themselves, speak about their ideas, their connection to Jamlitz, and their artistic approach.

Opening: August 9, 2025, at 2 PM


Duration: Until September 7, 2025


Table Talk #16 with Harald Hauswald and Herbert Schirmer (Curator of Spektrale and other exhibitions): Monday, September 1, 2025, at 6 PM

Venue: Kunsthalle Alte BHG, Kastanienallee 2, 15868 Jamlitz

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The Museum Haus des Papiers is currently presenting the photo festival “Communication with Conviction” at various locations across the city. The central question: What happens to democratic spaces when conviction becomes mere posturing and no one listens anymore? The festival focuses on themes of democratic values and respectful communication. Where language reaches its limits, images can open new spaces — here, photography becomes a medium for engagement and dialogue.

Johanna Maria Fritz is one of 29 international artists and photographers whose works are shown as large-format photo posters in public urban spaces. Her photographs from Ukraine are on view at the Teufelsberg Listening Station in Berlin until early September.

Exhibition dates: until September 7, 2025

Venue: Teufelsberg Listening Station, Berlin

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FOTOGALERIE Friedrichshain has been based in a prefabricated building next to the Warschauer Straße S-Bahn station since 1985, making it Berlin’s oldest photography gallery. It is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a major group exhibition that bridges its history with contemporary perspectives.

Harald Hauswald is also featured in the show with his work "Porzellanladen" – part of a selection of photographs from East Berlin in the early 1980s.

Opening: August 14, 2025, 7 PM

Exhibition Dates: August 15 – October 2

Location: FOTOGALERIE Friedrichshain

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The Neubrandenburg Art Collection is currently presenting the exhibition “Der große Schwof. Celebrating in the East,” curated by Petra Göllnitz and produced by the Jena Art Collection, as its third stop — on view until early September. The exhibition features works by Sibylle Bergemann, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, and Harald Hauswald.

Partying, dancing, drinking — “Schwofen” has always served as a welcome outlet for pent-up energy. People come together spontaneously or in organized ways, in private settings or at unofficial, often purpose-built venues. Every country and society develops its own distinct customs around celebration — especially under restrictive conditions such as those in the former GDR. Beyond the clichés of a drab East, this exhibition reveals a surprising and vibrant slice of everyday culture — lively, colorful, and wonderfully diverse. As part of the exhibition, Petra Göllnitz will host two artist talks: one with Ute Mahler & Werner Mahler, and another with Harald Hauswald.

Artist Talk: “Ute, Werner and I” With Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler, August 16, 2025, 3:00 PM, Admission: €10.00 / reduced €5.00 Registration requested

Artist Talk: “Life in Full” With Harald Hauswald, August 30, 2025, 3:00 PM, Admission: €10.00 / reduced €5.00 Registration requested

Exhibition duration: until September 7, 2025

Venue: Neubrandenburg Art Collection

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In conjunction with the UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 in Switzerland, the exhibition “SHE CAN KICK IT!” at f³ – Freiraum für Fotografie in Kreuzberg visually highlights women’s football and examines its complex history. Once ridiculed and even banned, women’s football is now celebrated almost everywhere in the world. Female football players are fighting for equality and against the sexualization of women’s bodies. They are major role models for girls and ideal ambassadors for advertising. Yet, significant disparities still exist compared to men’s sports, such as in playing opportunities and remuneration.

Johanna-Maria Fritz, along with Susan Meiselas, Anja Niedringhaus, and many other renowned photographers, is featured in the exhibition “SHE CAN KICK IT!”, curated by Nadine Barth.

Opening: June 26, 2025, at 7:00 PM

Duration: June 27 – September 7, 2025

Location: f³ – Freiraum für Fotografie 

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The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden is currently preparing the special exhibition ‘Freedom/Svoboda/Wolność: An Unfinished Story’. Focusing on the geographical region of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, the exhibition “Freiheit” explores the historical transformation of concepts of freedom and their relevance to the present day.

The exhibition is divided into three sections, where documents and objects are contextualized alongside works of visual art. The penultimate chapter of the exhibition, titled “Wohlstand” (Prosperity), focuses on the period of upheaval after 1990. Young people in East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic embraced newly found freedoms and experienced the “wild nineties” as a time of new beginnings. In this context, selected photographs by OSTKREUZ photographers Annette Hauschild and Thomas Meyer will be projected in the exhibition, focusing on the theme of techno culture.

Duration: June 20, 2025 – May 31, 2026

Location: Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden 

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Photo: Annette Hauschild/OSTKREUZ

At the Willy-Brandt-Haus, a selection of over 50 works from the museum’s own collection is on display until the end of June. Sibylle Bergemann is represented with works from her well-known series “Clärchens Ballhaus” and “Mauerpark”, which are part of the exhibition curated under the themes of Transformation and Intervention. The exhibited works range from documenting landscape changes to capturing snapshots of urban life in Berlin, symbolizing the societal transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Duration: Until June 29, 2025

Location: Willy-Brandt-Haus 

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As part of the “Artist Meets Archive” program by the Internationale Photoszene Köln, journalist Nicola Kuhn and OSTKREUZ photographer Anne Schönharting will discuss the topic “Uncomfortable Memories: Confronting a Colonial Family Legacy.” The conversation explores how photography can help uncover hidden traces of colonialism within German families. It raises questions about the role images play in shaping cultural memory—what narratives they preserve or omit—and how artistic perspectives can open new ways of engaging with this often-suppressed heritage.

Anne Schönharting’s award-winning project “Das Erbe” (The Legacy) is the result of years spent researching the estate of her great-grandfather. The photobook of the same name was published by Hartmann Books and received the Gold Medal of the German Photobook Prize in 2021. 

Date: June 5, 2025, 7:00 PM

Location: Library of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Leonard-Tietz-Straße 10, 50676 Cologne

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The Kommunale Galerie at Rathaus Reinickendorf presents Espen Eichhöfer’s 2011 photographic series “The Birth of a Nation” as part of the group exhibition “Touching the Unknown.” The curatorial concept of the show centers on the encounter with the unfamiliar, encouraging engagement with that which lies beyond the known.

When Espen Eichhöfer photographed this series in South Sudan during the first Independence Day celebrations in July 2011, six months had passed since the referendum that led to the country’s founding. Prior to that, the population of the resource-rich South had fought for over twenty years to gain independence from the North—at the cost of thousands of lives and the devastation of vast regions. Yet the peace in the new nation was short-lived: less than two years later, civil war broke out again, and the conflict continues to this day.

Opening: June 4, 2025, at 6:30 PM

Duration: June 5 – September 12, 2025

Location: Kommunale Galerie at Rathaus Reinickendorf 

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Sibylle Bergemann's well-known work “P2” is part of the group exhibition “Typologies. Photography in 20th Century Germany” at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Bergemann's series “P2”, created between 1974 and 1981, shows the differently furnished living rooms of the same block of flats in an industrially produced prefabricated building in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The abbreviation “P2” stands for a housing series developed in the early 1960s by the Institute for Building Construction at the Bauakademie, which redefined living with open floor plans.

The exhibition brings together more than 600 photographic works by 25 German artists. In addition to Sibylle Bergemann, they include: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo and Marianne Wex. 

Duration: until 14.7.25 

More Information: here

Since the beginning of Russia’s illegal war of aggression, Johanna-Maria Fritz has repeatedly traveled to Ukraine to document the unfolding events. In August 2024, as part of the solidarity partnership between Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district and the Darnytsia district in Kyiv, she spent several days on the ground photographing daily life amid the conflict. Her images bear witness to how people, despite great danger, strive to maintain their routines and preserve hope and a sense of normalcy.

To mark the official signing of the city partnership between Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Darnytsia—an initiative actively supported and shaped by the organization Be an Angel—Johanna-Maria Fritz’s photographs will be exhibited at the restaurant "Kreuzberger Himmel". The exhibition is curated by Nadine Barth.

Be an Angel advocates for the empowerment of refugees and runs the restaurant at Yorckstraße 89 in Kreuzberg, which is operated by people with refugee backgrounds.

Opening: May 22, 2025, at 6:30 PM, in the presence of Clara Herrmann, District Mayor of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Duration: May 23 – July 31, 2025

Location: Restaurant "Kreuzberger Himmel"

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To mark the 75th anniversary of the German Basic Law, the Art Advisory Board of the German Bundestag has invited 19 artists to engage with the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution. Harald Hauswald was invited to explore Article 8, which guarantees the right to freedom of assembly. His work on this theme is now on view as part of the exhibition “We – 19 Fundamental Rights. 19 Artistic Perspectives. A Space for Dialogue” at Forum Kunst im Bundestag, located in the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus.

In addition, Harald Hauswald’s “Texas Box” will be on display at the Berlin Wall Memorial of the German Bundestag until early October. The collection includes vintage prints depicting scenes from East Berlin that were originally shown in 1987 in the exhibition “The Other Side of the City”, curated by Neil Coleman at the Pro-Jex Gallery in Austin, Texas. After the gallery closed in 2015, the photographs were stored at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas and, following research conducted by the OSTKREUZ agency, have now returned to Berlin — 37 years later.

Opening: May 21, 2025, 7PM in the presence of the participating artists

Duration: May 22, 2025 – June 21, 2026

Location: Forum Kunst im Bundestag, Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus 

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On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, C/O Berlin is presenting the exhibition “Documentary in Flux”, an overview of the C/O Berlin Talent Award, which has been awarded since 2006 to a tandem of art and theory. Based on 14 exemplary artistic positions selected from a total of more than 90 award winners, the exhibition illustrates how documentary work in photography is in a constant state of flux.

Sibylle Fendt is represented in the exhibition with her (diploma) work “Uneins” from 2002, with which she won the Talent Award at the time. For this work, she portrayed five people who are referred to as “messies”. The photographs take a closer look at these people and their dysfunctional living spaces and at the same time paint a gloomy, dystopian vision of a society that has gone off the rails.

Opening: 23.5.25 

Duration: 24.5. until 17.9.25 

More Information: here

This year's 18th “horizonte” environmental photography festival in Zingst focuses on the theme of “Resources”. The festival exhibition of the same name shows the project “Internet Explorers”, which Heinrich Holtgreve has been realizing together with radio journalist Moritz Metz since the beginning of 2022, in the Panzerhalle / Wellnesscamp Düne 6 over a period of 10 days. Holtgreve and Metz - equipped with cameras and microphones - traveled around Germany together and visited all the places where Germany is physically connected to its neighboring countries in the form of fiber optic cables. As the first product of their joint journey, they have published a podcast in which they share their experiences on site and their expertise.

Duration: 23.5. until 1.6.25 

More Information: here

Thomas Meyer photographed along the former Berlin Wall from 1998 to 2001. At the end of the 1990s, he began photographing the inner-city wastelands in color with a large-format and medium-format camera during the cold season. Over the course of four years, he collected photographs that are not only significant from an urban planning perspective, but also capture moments that hold a great deal of promise.

Galerie Susanne Albrecht on Bleibtreustraße is now showing Thomas Meyer's photographs in a solo exhibition entitled “Mauer Land”.

Opening: 16.5.25, 7 PM 

Duration: 17.5. until 28.6.25 

More Information: here

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler's series “Monalisen der Vorstädte”, “Wo die Welt zu Ende war”, “Die seltsamen Tage” and fashion pictures created on the Elbe will be on display at the Freiheitshalle in Hof until the end of October in the exhibition “Gemeinsam”. Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler have been working together since 2008 on independent projects in which they address current political and social conditions.

In Berlin, the exhibitions “Ein Dorf 1950-2022. Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler und Ludwig Schirmer” at the Akademie der Künste (until 4.5.) and „Farbenrausch“ at  Galerie Springer (until 19.7.) are still running. 

Marit Lena Herrmann, curator of the exhibition “Ein Dorf”, will give a guided tour of the exhibition at the AdK on Hanseatenweg on Sunday, May 4 at 2 pm.

Duration (exhibtion in Hof): 11.5. until 26.10.25 

More Information: here

The producers' gallery “Altenau 04” in the village of Mühlberg an der Elbe is showing Stephanie Steinkopf's works “Manhattan-Straße der Jugend”, “Vogelfrei” and “Virpi” in a solo exhibition. Steinkopf's long-term projects usually explore the political and social conflicts that affect individuals. Through a process of intimate engagement, the photographer delves into the everyday lives and emotional relationships of her protagonists. Her work invites us to discover, identify and critically question some of the deprivations and prejudices of today's society.

Opening: 4.5.25, 3 PM, Introduction by Christin Müller, freelance curator and author, Leipzig, and accompanying musical program

Duartion: 5.5. until 27.7.25, opening hours by arrangement

Adress: Galerie Altenau 04, im Alten Pfarrhof, Dorfstr. 4, 04931 Mühlberg/OT Altenau

More Information: here

The International Days Ingelheim are showing the group exhibition “Curiosity, Courage and Adventure. Women photographers on their travels”. It presents works by 21 renowned historical and contemporary female photographers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, including Inge Morath, Marianne Breslauer, Helga Paris, Evelyn Richter, Barbara Klemm and OSTKREUZ Anne Schönharting and Jordis Antonia Schlösser.

Jordis Antonia Schlösser is represented in the exhibition with photographs from Iran, Cuba and Poland, while Anne Schönharting's works from Hong Kong and Kyrgyzstan will be on display.

Duration: 4.5. until 13.7.25 

More Information: here

Photo left: Anne Schönharting, photo right: Jordis Antonia Schlösser