HAMBURG.- 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 Contemporary scholars and artists from Peru reinterpret the historical documents and transform them into a living archive.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 Hamburg present works from the collection of F.C. Gundlach, the influential fashion photographer and founder of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, including 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 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.
