The painting “see you tomorrow” was created between late 2025 and early
2026. It depicts two horses nestled closely together, resting peacefully in
sleep—as if they were sharing a common dream...

BIO

Sihan Chen (*2002, China) is a painter. In her works, she uses the
horse in the Chinese zodiac as an element and explores the psychological
changes in self-development through color contrasts and composition. She
currently lives and works in Cologne.

CONTACT

@sihanchen__

This work focuses on the accidental black voids found in user-uploaded Street View images,

moments where digital data fails and leaves a blank space. The artist views these glitches not as mere errors, but as openings for lost memories and new narratives. To fill these gaps, the artist wrote a short story for each void, then transformed their flat, digital shapes into physical form.

The sculptures are created in various sizes and textures to reflect each story and its context. When these pieces are placed in front of the ancient Odysseus sculpture at Sperlonga, they create a bridge between the past and the present. Just as the ancient marble statues were rebuilt from broken fragments, these modern sculptures represent an attempt to reconstruct what is missing in our memory and our digital world.

Together, they reveal a shared process: from broken traces to possible worlds, rebuilt through imagination across both antiquity and the digital age.

BIO

Juyoung Lee (*1999, South Korea) works across film, sculpture, installation, sound and language-based practices. His practice begins with acts of capturing and collecting fragments from specific places, through which he examines how memory operates in relation to space, trauma, and individual vulnerability within broader social structures. He lives and works in Cologne.

CONTACT

@thebroken1999
juyoung.lee@khm.de

While living in Japan, I often encountered sudden train delays, later understanding that many were caused by suicide on railway tracks. A 2013 scientific study suggested that blue lighting at train stations could help prevent suicide, leading to its widespread installation across Tokyo platforms. Inspired by this context and Haruki Murakamis idea that death is an integral part of life, Japanese Blue imagines death as an inverted world. Through digital processing, I transform photographs of blue station lights into negative images, producing colors that appear both vivid and familiar. The work invites viewers to reflect on altered perceptions of life, death, and reality.

BIO

Yuanjin Wu (1995, China) works with photography and installation, focusing on memory, bodily perception, and socio-cultural frameworks. Her work has been exhibited in Tokyo and Shanghai and is part of the collection of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. She lives and works in Cologne.

CONTACT

@yuanjin_u
wuyuanjinn@gmail.com

The work explores the relationship between memory and distance shaped by time and space. It focuses on how personal interactions, especially shared intimacy or brief encounters, is remembered, altered, or broken into fragments over time.Through visually distorted portraits that become recognizable only from a certain distance or when viewed through the lens of an mobile device, the work reflects on the fragile and changeable nature of memory. The grid is not only a visual element, but also a conceptual reference to the way memories are formed and reshaped - subjective, incomplete, and constantly evolving.

BIO

Sebastian Wilsch (*2000, Bonn) centers his artistic practice primarily on documentary
photography. His work navigates between everyday subjects and conceptually informed
approaches, operating within a space of tension between intimacy and societal reflection.
Wilsch explores central themes such as interpersonal relationships, identity, and
transgenerational debt through both photographic series and filmic works.

CONTACT

@Abholausweis
sebastianwilsch@outlook.de

Picking at my skin is an old habit of mine. It began when I was very young, before I was
even aware that it was a habit.

Whenever I concentrate on something, when I feel unstable, when I sit and read a book—
always, I pick at my skin. Wherever I’ve been, small pieces of my skin are left behind.
They range from tiny grains to slightly larger fragments. I leave parts of myself in the
places where I stay.

The spots where the skin has been torn away sometimes reveal soft pink flesh,
sometimes begin to bleed, and sometimes leave behind a dangling piece that hasn’t fully
come off. My hands are like my shame. When I show my hands to someone, I often try to
hide them.

No matter how much I pick, new skin always grows back. At night my fingers may be
torn up, but by the next morning I wake to find them ever so slightly smoothed over. I take
myself apart, I create my own shame, and my body heals itself.
I tried not to destroy anything, yet I destroy myself. Someone once called this habit a form
of self-harm. Above all, more than anyone else, I am the one who harms myself.
What are you destroying? The tattered corner of a book, hands dried from washing too
often, a window frame rusted from being left alone too long, bleeding lips, the long
horizontal scars on your back from growing pains.
I float our violences on water, in the most non-violent way.

BIO

Shinyoung Rhyu (*1998, South Korea) works with photography and installation. She draws attention to the often-overlooked occurrences of daily life, presenting them from a fresh perspective and unveils the invisible layers of society. She lives and works in Cologne.

CONTACT

shinyoungrhyu.com
@plersomnium
shinyoung.rhyu@khm.de

On a taxidermy foam base of a deer, replica antlers made with the materials and techniques of commercial fishing bait are mounted. They are cast from the hunting trophy of the deer that the artist‘s grandfather shot and killed. He was a serial pedophile rapist.

Fishing line hooks into them and spreads in a web of associations. 

Within a metal frame, interlocking patches of the same soft plastic are stretched like an animal hide being processed into leather. They are sewn together and show indentations reminiscent of those in surgical training kits.

The very specific shape of the patches is drawn from the mathematical disciple of tessellation: The spectre is a unique tile discovered in 2023 that can tile the plane only with itself (monotile) without ever creating a recognizable pattern (aperiodically). It repeats, but never in the same way.

The “hide” has been featured as costumes in the performance film TRAUMATOPHILIA (wt). 

The film imagines the workings of the cycle of transgenerational trauma, as each chapter uses a different mathematical shape to symbolize its conceptualization and rationalization, desperately trying to find a system of logic that can help make sense of what is ineffable.

Looking towards the laws of science in an attempt to resolve emotional turmoil, the installation is placed next to Richard Serra’s Right Angle Prop, exuding the legitimacy of the elementary principles of physics. The “hide”, too, is precariously under tension, the fishing line slowly cutting through the gelatinous plastic from all sides.

BIO

Niels Gössel (*1997, Münster) is a wood carver by trade and combines sculpture, film and performance in order to question (western) mechanisms of rationalization concerning trauma and social injustice. Each project seeps into the next in a continuous web of visual and conceptual associations, with queerness and psychoanalytic thought threading throughout. He lives and works in Cologne.

CONTACT

nielsgoessel.com
@nie.lope 
niels.goessel@gmail.com

CYOC (Choose your own Conqueror) is an installation based on a death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte, rendered in translucent porcelain. The masks are set in a row like soldiers awaiting orders, contrasting the serene facial expression of a dead man hovering from the wall at the height he used to stand at when he was alive - 168 cm. At the appropriate height below each face, a bare flaccid penis of the same material. Through the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, the artist examines contemporary global political powers and societal turbulences. This current cultural climate, along with its informational mystification and personality cults, in many ways resembles the informational warfare Napoleon used. He retains his personality cult post mortem. His corpse is taken apart for souvenirs. His penis, hands and feet were cut off by an attending physician. At the moment, his penis is in the possession of an American heiress. The disinformation, started by Napoleon himself, lives on. Is it his death mask, or was the fake returned after it was stolen? Was his penis cut off, or was it replaced with the penis of a servant? 

Who ordered the physician to cut the body parts of Napoleon, and why? The blurred borders between superstition,religion and politics lead to a complete mythologization of the figure of the erstwhile tyrant of Europe - a meme, a cake, a psychiatric condition, a clown, a saint, whose dead body can be used as a personal keychain. For good luck.

BIO

Alexandra Lex Nikitina (*1989, Ukraine) of mixed Russian-Ukrainian origin.
Pronouns it/its. Former journalist and a writer, published in Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Odessa, Shanghai media and publishing houses. It has been studying media arts since 2022. Its artistic practice is focused on malleability of information, particularly through the tool of historicism, and research on the importance of material for the aesthetic experience. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

CONTACT

Portfolio.lex.com
@just.lex.n
lexxx3000@proton.me

Both drawings continue an ongoing exploration of familial bonds internalised within oneself and often perceived as unbreakable. The visual constellation in the larger drawing reflects how such bonds may fracture or be cast off, and what remains in their aftermath, including emotional and psychological residues.

BIO

Jeongan Choi (*2001, Korea) is a visual artist living and working in Cologne, Germany. Her practice centers on drawing as both an idea and a method, alongside writing and self-publishing. Her work reflects on the passage of time and the traces it leaves behind, the frameworks that shape individuals and society, and the moments when these structures inevitably fracture. These relationships between narrative and image form the core of her artistic inquiry. Her ongoing A4-format drawing practice is documented in the “Drawing Archive” on her website.

CONTACT

jeonganchoi.com
@annchoiiiiii
jeongan.choi@khm.de

The work represents an approach to Adolf Luther’s concave mirrors. Latent Core Dysfunction draws on the optical distortions of light and mirrors that challenge our perception in Luther’s work and translates them into a hybrid space. Here, an overlap emerges between the digital and the material sphere. The installation involves us in its generative process, effectively using us as material. We are not the only ones observing—something gazes back from the in-between.

I aim to confront Luther’s work with modern technology and its impact on our perception of space and time. In doing so, I further explore the disrupted connection between self-experience and the external world. Moreover, I address surveillance and data processing as central themes of this work.

BIO

Juri Lechthoff (*1998, Bielefeld) developed a multifaceted audiovisual practice during his studies at the Münster Academy of Art, encompassing music production, performative sound works, film scoring, and audiovisual installations. His work focuses on feedback loops within technocratic structures. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

CONTACT

@juri_member
jurilechthoff@web.de

The triptych “Post Right Angle I–III” explores the transformation of constructive forms through generative design. While industrial design was long characterized by right-angled, standardized structures, AI-based optimization processes now lead to organic, material-efficient forms reminiscent of
natural load-bearing principles.

The CNC-milled wooden frames appear like fragments of a bone-like scaffold. Their organic form is broken up by polygonal surfaces that reveal their digital origins. At the center of each frame is a heat-treated steel plate with color gradients from blue to red, inspired by visual codes from stress and simulation software.

On top of this, 3D-printed scans of tree bark and spinal structures can be seen. These natural cell and support structures resemble the forms of generative algorithms. The work shows how digital technologies are once again taking up principles of nature and replacing rectangular industrial thinking.

BIO

17171717171717 (pronounced: Seven times Seventeen) (*1996 in Essen, Germany). In their artistic practice, interactive installations and iridescent materials engage in a dialogue that moves between pop culture, technology, and science. Currently, 17171717171717 is studying media arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM).

CONTACT

7X17.de
@171717171717i7
Hi@7x17.de

Pain is a physical reaction that is charged with cultural context. Reliable anesthesia masks
were not developed until the end of the 19th century, such as the Schimmelbusch mask, a
hinged mask into which a freshly sterilized piece of cloth soaked in chloroform is inserted.
Here they are combined with two Catholic saints who represent both pain and queerness: St.
Sebastian, patron saint of gay men and BDSM practitioners, and St. Agatha, who had her
breasts cut off and is important to some trans masc people.

BIO

Gabriel Hahner (*1997, Fulda) studied in the class for Performance Art at Kunstakademie Münster. They work primarily with sculptures and (video) installations. They explore the boundaries of bodies and eras, with a particular interest in intimacy and nostalgia.

CONTACT

@schicht.dessert

The work is a large-scale ink drawing on paper created as a direct fixation of a bodily state. The process is not pre-planned; the form emerges through physical presence — standing, holding, breathing, and bodily weight. The gesture appears not as expression, but as a trace of being in space.

Paper functions as a vulnerable surface, receptive to pressure and impulse. Black ink condenses the moment, fixing the tension between body and environment. The line carries no symbolic meaning and refers to no narrative — it holds a state. The practice is grounded in an ontology of presence: the work neither represents nor comments on reality, but asserts the fact of bodily existence in space. Control and release coexist as a single process. The drawing becomes a trace of an inner axis maintained under conditions of pressure and uncertainty.

BIO

Alexandra Sakir (*1989, Russia) is a multidisciplinary artist working with drawing, performance, and media. Her practice is based on large-scale ink works as traces of bodily states. She explores presence as an ontological fact of the body in space, focusing on tension between control and release, endurance, and inner alignment.

CONTACT

@alexandra.sakir
alexandrasakir.studio@gmail.com