“Close your eyes and observe everything you can see in that moment.

This is your ability to use the world of imagination.”

Chema Alvargonzalez

 

 

ABWESENHEIT takes its title from the German word for “absence”, a concept that permeates both the work and the memory of Chema Alvargonzalez. Conceived as a tribute and, at the same time, a commemoration, the exhibition marks the twentieth anniversary of GlogauAIR, the artist residency programme founded by the artist in the heart of Kreuzberg, Berlin.

 

The character of the building that hosts the exhibition — formerly the artist’s home and studio during his years in Berlin, and now a residency space — provides an essential framework for understanding one of the central themes underpinning this project: the manifestation of time as both a historical process and a dimension of personal experience. Here, space is not merely a container but a body traversed by layers of memory, past presences, enduring absences, and a territory open to the imagination.

 

Absence, as the result of disappearance, manifests itself on multiple levels. It becomes visible in the physical traces of the building, in the movement through the steps of its magnificent interior staircase, and in the garden trees that appear through the windows as silent witnesses. Like closed eyes, these elements reflect the gap between the inner and the outer, between material reality and its mental projection. Within this interval, perception becomes uncertain and memory fragmentary.

 

The exhibition proposes a journey through voids: voids of memory, narrative and presence. The unknown, the imperceptible and the forgotten emerge not as deficiencies, but as active zones of meaning. In this sense, ABWESENHEIT does not merely recall; it activates an experience in which the visitor is confronted with that which cannot be fully grasped.

 

The works brought together — installation, photography, sculpture, light and sound — engage with this conceptual framework through a plurality of approaches. Among them are the artist’s emblematic suitcases, recurring objects within his practice that function as devices of transit, containers of stories, and metaphors of displacement. In this exhibition, these works acquire an additional dimension: they evoke not only physical travel, but also the passage between presence and absence, between lived experience and remembrance.

 

For the first time, a selection of the artist’s working documents is also presented, introducing an intimate dimension to the exhibition. These materials do not seek to complete a biography but rather to emphasise its interruptions, silences and obscurities. In their fragmentary nature, they reinforce the idea that all memory is shaped by gaps and acts of reconstruction.

 

The sonic and luminous dimensions of the exhibition amplify this experience, generating atmospheres that oscillate between the tangible and the ephemeral. Light does not reveal everything; sound does not narrate in a linear manner. Both operate as ambiguous presences accompanying the visitor through a space where time appears suspended or, more precisely, stratified.

 

Within the context of GlogauAIR’s twenty years, ABWESENHEIT also presents itself as a reflection on continuity and transformation. Conceived as a place of encounter and production, the residency programme has witnessed countless artistic trajectories. Today, that flow of temporary presences intertwines with the permanent absence of its founder, generating a tension that runs throughout the entire space.

 

Thus, the exhibition does not merely commemorate; it reactivates. Rather than closing a memory, it opens it. Rather than fixing a legacy, it sets it in motion. ABWESENHEIT invites us to inhabit that interval where past and present intersect, where the visible coexists with the hidden, and where absence, far from being a void, becomes a form of presence.

 

 

 

 

Mercedes Cerón

Lisbon, April 2026