Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other is conceived as a curatorial act of generosity that invites us to move beyond the parameters of our own conformity and into the realm of acceptance and tolerance of the unknown or undecipherable in life. The exhibition aims to be an invitation to reflect on the intimacy of photography’s “nature”, championing a time when we can consider the infinite possibilities of human kindness and harness love as a source of power, both politically, culturally, and familial.

This exhibition is centred around the diverse ways of­ depicting corporeality, with the body understood as a medium that can express a variety of roles, projections, desires, and fantasies. The objects from the F.C. Gundlach Collection presented here – collected from the mid-1970s onwards – are not only of great contemporary relevance in light of the way in which the queer community has reconfigured itself, but also provide a glimpse into an exciting yet simultaneously very intimate area of Gundlach’s private collection...

Abdulhamid Kircher, who grew up between Berlin and New York, seeks within analogue photography possibilities of­ reconciliation and intimate encounter, while documenting the effects of patriarchal violence within his closest ­circles. His spatial photographic installation Rotting from Within can be seen as a fragmented family album – an inquiry into the ambivalent relationship to his paternal lineage.

How can the evolution of contemporary art serve as a lens through which to understand the history of counterculture – a phenomenon that continues to influence artistic approaches today? This question serves as a guiding force behind the exhibition Inner Mornings, or Forms of Counterculture.

This exhibition, developed in cooperation with the Stiftung F.C. Gundlach, is dedicated to the multifaceted work of F.C. Gundlach (1926–2021) – photographer, networker, collector, and patron, presenting his iconic fashion photographs alongside previously unpublished works as well as pieces by his peers, role models, and successors.

This exhibition’s opening section seeks to decipher (sepulchral) landscapes imbued with historical memories and informed by personal experience, myth, and ideology, and to examine how significance affects the images’ overall latent meanings. The exhibition’s second section explores how artists use drop shadows, optical devices, and photographic appropriation to record the states of forms and serve as a matrix, a constitutive vehicle for the organization of ideas, for an ecology of attention. The exhibition’s third and closing section concentrates on protocols, image treatment, and the production of objects of historical and poetic evocation that establish new relationships with memory, intimacy, and the archive...

In this solo exhibition, Melike Kara grapples with questions of identity, memory, and transformation. The exhibition’s origins lie in the artist’s intensive engagement with her Kurdish heritage, which in recent years she has researched, archived, and explored through her art practice. One of the exhibition’s aims is to visually convey the beauty of Kurdish traditions – a beauty that persists despite pain and persecution.

This exhibition will mark the first institutional solo exhibition of the UK artist Nina Porter. The presentation, to be held in the downstairs gallery of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, will comprise new works commissioned by the Kunstverein on occasion of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026.

Why do historical photographs and sound recordings from a past shaped by colonialism still matter today? Who finds meaning in them – and why or to what end?

Franki Raffles (1955–1994) was a feminist, activist, and social documentary photographer whose work focused on the realities of women’s lives. Her photographic series – often accompanied by quotes and interviews – centre on the working conditions and everyday working lives of women in Scotland, the Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine), China, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Israel, and Palestine.

Looking back, how are we to interrogate the violent practices of the colonial era today? How can wounds be made visible – in order to start the process of healing? In her first exhibition in Germany, the young Egyptian artist Sara Sallam – who lives in the Netherlands – addresses these questions in new works developed especially for the MK&G Hamburg, exploring the museum’s archaeological and photographic collection and its colonial legacy across three sections: “On Mourning”, “On Expulsion”, and “On Resistance”.