The 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 presents eleven exhibitions in eight renowned museums and art institutions in Hamburg, Germany. The international festival, under the artistic direction of London-based Mark Sealy, celebrates the importance of photography in our time and demonstrates that it can do more than merely observe: photography can connect people and inspire reflection on justice, responsibility and humanity.

The theme of the 9th Triennial is: Alliance, Infinity, Love—in the Face of the Other. These three guiding concepts form the common thread running through all eleven exhibitions and invite visitors to move beyond the mere contemplation of photography and become active participants in a shared cultural experience.

The central exhibition Alliance, Infinity, Love—in the Face of the Other, curated by Mark Sealy, will be on view at Deichtorhallen Hamburg’s Hall for Contemporary Art. It addresses the festival’s central theme and celebrates the cultural and artistic diversity of photography, its healing and transformative power. It presents over 30 artistic positions spanning photography, video and film, which tell of different places 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 term Alliance stands for solidarity and collective action, as exemplified by the exhibition Franki Raffles. Photography, Activism, Campaign Works at the Museum of Work. Raffles, a British photographer, placed the working realities of women in the 1970s and 1980s at the focus of her social documentary work and used photography as a tool to combat injustice.

Resonating Images from Peru at MARKK—Museum am Rothenbaum World Cultures and Arts takes the historical photographs and audio recordings from the country’s colonially shaped past, created by the German amateur researcher Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848–1928), as a starting point. Contemporary scholars and artists from Peru reinterpret the historical documents and transform them into a living archive.

The solo exhibition Whispers by Melike Kara at the Kunsthaus Hamburg also engages with the theme of Alliance. In a large-scale installation Kara reflects on her Kurdish heritage, which she has researched, archived and explored. The focus lies on questions of identity, memory and healing.

Hamburger Kunsthalle‘s exhibition BUT I WORLD I SEE YOU* (*Rémy Zaugg) provides a philosophical and historical grounding for the exploration of photographs, films and artifacts informed by personal experience, myth and ideology. Across its three sections, the exhibition meditates on landscapes of memory, the transformations of form, and the poetic and political charge of the archive.

Under the term Infinity, photography is understood as a medium that does not merely represent reality, but opens up perspectives that connect past, present and future. In the exhibition Care. Reconsidering Photography at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Sara Sallam explores how colonial pictures continue to exert their influence. Drawing on examples from the museum’s archaeological and photographic collection, she develops counter-narratives that challenge colonial histories and invite more compassionate encounters with the past.

In her first institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Nina Porter experiments with new pictorial forms, mixing photography and sculpture. Her most recent work troubles the dynamic between camera, subject and image.

The exhibition Inner Mornings, or Forms of Counterculture at Falckenberg Collection, which takes the work of Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun as its point of departure, presents artistic resistance as a continuous process. 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 field— Love —is the human. PHOXXI—Temporary House of Photography presents two contemporary positions, Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah and Abdulhamid Kircher, that engage experimentally and spatially with analogue colour photography, activating its emotional frequencies. Photography is made tangible here as a medium of proximity, while at the same time being pushed to its material limits.

With Cocktail Prolongé: F.C. Gundlach Special, the Deichtorhallen Hamburgpresent works from the collection of F.C. Gundlach, the influential fashion photographer and founder of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, including Diane Arbus, Jasmina Cibic, 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 fashion, people and society. The exhibition You’ll Never Watch Alone shows Gundlach as networker, photographer, collector and patron. The exhibition takes Gundlach’s work as a starting point to illuminate the emergence of photography as a visual culture, its associated milieu, and the relevance of photography for social movements.

The 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 stands for a new understanding of visibility. Photography shows that every gaze carries responsibility. In a world shaped by conflict, this Triennial’s goal is to reflect on the complex nature of humanity and to bring us closer together in our understanding of each other through signposting acts of solidarity, openness and insistence on our ability to love.

Gifts of Friendship

The exhibition Utopia. The Right to Hope brings artistic positions together, that in the face of global crises develop specific visions for a more just and sustainable way of living. In addition to a critical examination of utopia itself — with its promise of happiness as well as its totalitarian implications — Utopia focuses on projects that aim to create change on a small scale. The works and objects on display suggest alternative ways of life that seem unattainable from today’s perspective. Art in particular can make pioneering contributions to utopian models of the future. Since the modern era it has critically engaged with social processes through its range of aesthetic and thematic means. This critical stance has always made art a space for utopian thinking.

Artists and collectives
AES+F, Kader Attia, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, melanie bonajo, Cao Fei, Anetta Mona Chişa und Lucia Tkáčová, Jasmina Cibic, Stephan Huber und Raimund Kummer, Sven Johne, Keiken, Mischa Leinkauf, Cornelia Parker, Lin May Saeed, Jaanus Samma, Tomás Saraceno, Terreform ONE, Nasan Tur und Liam Young.

Jasmina Cibic — NADA (Act I, Act II, Act III), 2017 – 2018

Presented in the exhibition MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES — Art / Design / Dunkerque – Krefeld

Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque
24 January – 30 August 2026

General curators: Katia Baudin (Director, Kunstmuseen Krefeld) & Keren Detton (Director, Frac Grand Large) 
Curator of the Dunkerque exhibition: Keren Detton

Participating artists include:
Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Richard Artschwager, Marion Baruch, Peter Behrens, Henryk Berlewi, Bless, Shannon Bool, Franck Bragigand, Marcel Broodthaers, Alexander Calder, Christo, Jasmina Cibic, Sonia Delaunay, Walter Dexel, Volker Döhne, Helmut Dorner, Paul Dressler, Otto Eckmann, Lucio Fontana, Ludger Gerdes, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Hans Haacke, Peter Halley, Anton Henning, Candida Höfer, Vassily Kandinsky, Annette Kelm, Konrad Klapheck, Yves Klein, Harald Klingelhöller, Karin Kneffel, Eva Kot’átková, Jannis Kounellis, Adolf Luther, László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Mohrbutter, Marcel Odenbach, Claes Oldenburg, Otto Piene, Sigmar Polke, Norbert Prangenberg, raumlaborberlin, David Reed, Gerhard Richter, Hans Theo Richter, Dieter Roth, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Martin Schwenk, Gerry Schum, Daniel Spoerri, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Tinguely, Rosemarie Trockel, Timm Ulrichs, Ignacio Uriarte, Isabelle Vannobel, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West.

Set within the expansive architecture of the Lacaton & Vassal building that hosts Frac Grand Large, MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES brings together historical, archival, and contemporary works to question how museums evolve, how they inhabit space, and how artistic legacies circulate and are reactivated across borders. The exhibition constitutes a major cultural exchange between Dunkerque and Krefeld marking 50 years of a civic and institutional partnership, and foregrounds the museum as a site of critical inquiry, social engagement, and aesthetic experimentation.

Within this ambitious framework, Jasmina Cibic presents her film trilogy NADA: Act I, Act II, Act III, deepening the exhibition’s examination of how institutions—architectural, political, and cultural—stage ideologies and shape the imaginaries of modernity.

A Trilogy on the Architectures of Statecraft, Cultural Seduction, and the Afterlives of Soft Power

NADA is a three-part film project that scrutinises the strategic role of art, architecture, and performance within the machinery of nation-building. Across its three Acts, the trilogy follows a choreography of persuasion in which aesthetics are mobilised to communicate ideology, stabilise political alliances, and project visions of progress.

Each film situates itself within a historically charged architectural space—modernist showcases, diplomatic interiors, and state-sanctioned cultural gifts—allowing the built environment to function as both stage and protagonist. These spaces, as seen throughout MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES, echo the exhibition’s broader inquiry into how modern architecture has served as a vehicle for political ambition and institutional identity.

Act I focuses on a mid-century landmark commission intended to embody national ideals, staging a negotiation between cultural advisors, architects, and political representatives.
Act II unfolds in an interior shaped by diplomatic protocol, where performers animate speeches and policy documents, revealing the aestheticised labour of political consensus.
Act III revisits a site of symbolic cultural gifting—an architectural offering intended to cement geopolitical relations—where archival dialogue exposes the language of international friendship and soft power.

Across the trilogy, the character NADA (“hope” in several Slavic languages, yet also resonant with emptiness) carries the paradox of cultural idealism within ideological frameworks. She embodies both the aspirational promise of art and the risk of its instrumentalisation.

Through precise mise-en-scène and the reactivation of archival discourse, Cibic examines how cultural infrastructures produce political meaning—making ideology appear natural, desirable, even beautiful. Yet the trilogy also points toward alternative readings: moments when scripted narratives falter, when monumental gestures reveal their fragility, and when institutional futures may be reimagined.

In the context of MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES, NADA reflects on the museum itself as a political technology—an apparatus that collects, preserves, legitimises, and performs the values of a society. By situating the trilogy within this cross-border exhibition, the work interrogates how institutions inherit histories, how they enact power, and how they might propose new modes of solidarity and cultural responsibility.

Together, Acts I–III form a meditation on the choreography of national self-image—and on what becomes possible when that choreography is exposed, questioned, or disrupted.

Jasmina Cibic’s The Gift Ecology continues the artist’s exploration of the anthropological concept of the gift and its inherent obligations of circulation and reciprocity, as succinctly described by Marcel Mauss in his seminal essay The Gift. At Void Art Centre, Cibic focuses on the extractivism of both nature and culture within the history of political gifting—particularly gifts that supported the construction of transnational spheres of influence through soft power strategies.

The Gift Ecology presents a new body of work spanning video installation, photography, and sculpture. These works converge in restoring agency to art objects, animals, and plants once gifted in the name of the nation. In Cibic’s installation, human and non-human actors come together as storytellers, proposing a shared politics of mutualism, collaboration, justice, and care.

A series within the exhibition, also titled The Gift Ecology, features photographs of Yugoslav government documents detailing the exchange of animals and the ritualistic functions these gifts served in constructing a new transnational political space during the Cold War—namely, the Non-Aligned Movement. This forum of developing and largely postcolonial states proposed a “third way” of governance, resisting the polarisation of the world between the United States and the Soviet Union. Cibic overlays these archival images with white pencil, erasing the surrounding geographical landscapes and directing the viewer’s attention solely to the animals’ portraits and the diplomatic gaze their presentation once served. As many of the countries—and the multilateral alignments these animals were meant to represent—fracture and dissolve, the obligation of reciprocity tethered to these gifts dissipates. The animals, once symbols of soft power, are reframed as agents, inhabiting the ruins of colonial and ideological structures. In this context, The Gift Ecology invites us to see animals as a living archive of ongoing extractivist methods of cultural diplomacy – even within the building of the postcolonial transnational space.

Mothers (2025), a new video work, was created within the context of the archive of the Gallery of the Non-Aligned—the only institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting artworks gifted by heads of state, ambassadors, and cultural elites of the Non-Aligned Movement. From this archive, Cibic selected only sculptures depicting female heads, busts, and figures—representations of emergent mother nations. Chosen by predominantly male government officials and created by male artists, these sculptures stand in as allegorical mother nations, representing countries whose cultural capital has consistantly been obfuscated, exoticised, and/or destroyed by Western powers. In the video, these sculptures are linked through a sequence of explosions, transforming them into ciphers of ancestral urgency—a matriarchal warning system spanning territories and timelines. Illuminated like precious jewels and rotating slowly as if in a storefront display, the sculptures develop cracks that exponentially accumulate until the objects ultimately disintegrate into dust and debris, only to re-emerge as a new sculptural configuration. These too are female forms, mothers shaped by different cultural and political contexts. This cyclical eternal transformation underlines the necessity of the enduring process of resilience-building, where symbolic collapse becomes the ground for reinvention. The accompanying soundscape merges ASMR-inspired textures—highlighting the contemporary voyeuristic pleasures derived from destruction—with a female narrator voicing words of resistance and strategies for survival, drawn from archival debates on cultural sovereignty and self-determination.

The final component of the exhibition is a collaborative project with United Nations human rights advocates. The UN, as the symbolic parent of the Non-Aligned Movement, was the setting where the term “Non-Alignment” was first introduced by India and Yugoslavia in 1950 in relation to the Korean War. For this work, Cibic invited members of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies to donate their tears, which she then photographed under a microscope. Resembling planetary terrains, these images are transferred onto brass plates. At first glance resembling celestial bodies, the works confront viewers with the fragile terrain of human rights advocacy within the erosion of international law. They serve as a speculative invitation to imagine a more just world—even as a parallel universe built from the potential futures of the past.

The exhibition culminates in a suspended bronze globe featuring fictional islands, continents, and waterways—all derived from the microscopic tear photographs. Cast in bronze—a material historically bound to patriarchal symbols of power—the rotating globe suggests a reversal of the extractivist gaze employed by hegemonic systems in the production of patriarchial spectacle. The sculpture becomes an illusionist device, hinting at new planetary imaginaries born from care, resilience, and restitution.

Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition at Void Art Centre addresses both historical and contemporary contexts of self-determination and cultural emancipation. Through its layered installations, the exhibition reflects on the extractivism of nature and culture as tools of nation-building. It interrogates our present-day fascination with ruins, the exoticisation of indigeneity in post-collapse cultural movements, and asks: What role can art and culture play within dissolved systems of solidarity – and care and how might they help us imagine new forms of agency?

Credits:

Tears gifted by the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies
Microscope photography: Mojca Opresnik, Slovene National Institute of Chemistry

Photogrammetry: Kibla, Slovenia
Voice Over: Anna-Louise Plowman
Visual Effects Supervisor: Henrik Bach Christensen
Lighting and rendering Christoph G. Balanescu
Effects TD: Leo Evershed
Wangle Studio producer: Sune Neye
Sound design: Sašo Kalan

With support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro, The Non-Aligned Art Collection Laboratory, Museum of Yugoslavia, the Slovene National Institute of Chemistry and Waddington Studios London