Soft Evidence | Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie × Kunstquartier Bethanien

"Soft Evidence " brings together thirteen emerging artists who explore the subtle traces of being human. Through intimate gestures, personal stories, and encounters with materials, their works become soft evidence of vulnerability, memory, and desire.

Showcasing a wide range of media and approaches, the exhibition poses a specific inquiry into today’s visual and photographic discourse. Together, the works bear witness to the fact that the human experience is not an act of certainty, but an embrace of questioning and doubt.

The group exhibition Soft Evidence presents the results of a year-long seminar titled “Photography in the Context of Contemporary Art” at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, led and curated by Paul Hutchinson.

Featuring works by Sebastian Alten, Daria Artemova, Leonardo Flores, Luca Gaspard, Vicky Hristova, Zuzanna Kałużna, Herkusho Kats, Klára Kopečková, Carola Lampe, Kevin Pawlak, Charlotte Stella, Mariia Vydrenko, and Anh Vu.

Sebastian Alten

Sebastian Alten (b. 1983) has a background in media studies, sociology, and film production. His artistic practice is rooted primarily in analog photography and darkroom printing. In his recent large-format silver gelatin works, he explores the conditions of appearance, tracing the threshold between revelation and concealment.

Instagram: @sebastianalten | Website: sebastian-alten.com

Daria Artemova | Passing Through

Daria Artemova is a Ukrainian artist whose black-and-white photographic practice explores impermanence, memory, and the emotional space between presence and absence. Through her series *Passing Through*, shaped by movement and blur, she creates atmospheric images that hover between observation and feeling.

Instagram: @greyedouteye

Leonardo Flores | 13.90€ + Tips

Leonardo Flores (born 1989 in Mexico) holds a degree in visual arts. Interested in the infraordinary, he seeks to challenge viewers’ perceptions of everyday life. He presents a collection of envelopes in which he received his tips while working as a waiter, restaurant order tickets generated continuously during his shifts, and photographs documenting the sweat left on his work clothes. Together, these traces form an archive of everyday labor, reflecting on the relationship between work, value, and its transformation into artistic practice.

Instagram: @floresleonardo | Website: leonardo-flores.com

Luca Vincenc Gaspard

Luca Gaspard (b. 1997) works with photography and selected materials. He explores traces of time, use, and touch. His photographic observations focus on surfaces and spaces where human change and personal and social tensions converge. Photography and material influence and reinforce each other through their interplay, creating a distinct layer of vulnerability.

Instagram: @vince.gaspard

Vicky Hristova | Chosen Family

Through my work as a journalist, I tell stories of people whose identities are often misunderstood. Chosen Family continues this commitment to representation, but turns the camera toward those closest to me. I began photographing my closest friends as an intimate act of acknowledgment—a way of saying, “I see you, and I love you.” Chosen Family is a “thank you” to those who have supported me, stood by me, and helped shape who I am today.

Instagram: @vickyhrist | Website: vickyhristova.com

Zuzanna Maria Kałużna

Zuzanna Maria Kałużna (b. 1986) follows an associative and experimental creative process. Photographs, image fragments, and self-portraits enter into dialogue with one another, forming an open arrangement. Autobiographical traces give rise to visual connections. Between memory, the present, and imagination, a pictorial space unfolds that resists a linear narrative and invites viewers to form their own connections.

Website:zuzannamariakaluzna.com

Herkusho Kats | Reflections of an Iconography

Herkusho is a trained architect, photographer, and interdisciplinary artist. Her practice blends intuition, research, and poetic blurriness, and in recent years has focused on the past of places and the stories they carry. The works on view—a video essay and a series of 3D collages—evoke reflections on iconography within historic events.

Instagram: @herkusho

Klára Kopečková | Petrichor

Klára Kopečková (b. 1992, Czechia) is a lens-based artist working across photography and installation. Her practice reflects on adaptation and the ways emotional states take physical form. In *Petrichor*— takingits name from the scent of rain after a dry spell—photographs printed on fabric create an immersive environment for visitors to move through, inviting an embodied experience of change, sensory memory, and emotion.

Instagram: @klarakopecek

Carola Lampe | Tell me what to feel

Carola Lampe is a Berlin-based artist and software developer with a degree in Fine Arts. Working across photography, installation, and video, she explores the social, cultural, and political implications of digitalization. *Tell me what to feel*is a video essay that weaves together found footage into a speculative narrative examining how digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life and society.

Instagram: @carolalampeWebsite: carolalampe.com

Kevin Pawlak | Study hard, otherwise you’ll end up like me, a cleaner

Kevin Pawlak (b. 2000, Bochum, Germany) works with photography and archival material. His work explores questions of identity, migration, class, and queerness. For “Mach deine Schule, sonst wirst du wie ich, eine Putzfrau (Study hard, otherwise you’ll end up like me, a cleaner),” he returns with his mother to places from their shared past in Germany’s Ruhr region.

Instagram: @keevvkeevv

Charlotte Stella | Visibility Can Be a Regulatory Act

Charlotte Stella works with analog photography and cyanotype. In *Visibility can be a Regulatory Act*, black-and-white photographs are transformed into cyanotypes depicting natural and artificial structures emerging through light and shadow. Informed by a legal feminist perspective, her work explores how visibility is never neutral but can be produced, regulated, and denied through law and political power.

Instagram: @charlottestella

Mariia Vydrenko

Mariia Vydrenko’s (Ukraine, Kyiv) artistic practice addresses the processing of personal and shared experiences against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. She uses analog media as a counterpoint to the manipulation and numbing effect of digital documentary imagery. In her recent darkroom prints and Super 8 video, three layers of “new reality” are revealed: interaction with the symbolic object embedded by the military into the urban landscape; the reality of those involved with the military on the home front (a friend who develops tactical gear for the army in his workshop); and the altered intimacy of private spaces and conversations.

Instagram: @tardi.maria

Anh Vu | Pacing

Anh Vu (b. 1990) is trained in medicine, art history, philology, and culturally sensitive psychiatric-ethnological research. She collects field notes from her lived reality, shaped by Post-Covid Syndrome and ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). This condition shapes her artistic methodology. Her long-term autoethnographic research project, *Pacing*, is an invitation into a mixed-media microcosm of care, longing, ableism, and systemic violence.

Instagram: @anvussell | Website: anh-vu.de

Framework program

Thursday, Aug.²⁷, 2026,

7 p.m. Opening Reception 
 

7:30 – 7:35 p.m. 5-minute reading performance by Anh Vu (de)

Saturday, August²⁹, 2026

3 & 6 p.m. Guided Tours (German/English)

Sunday, Aug.³⁰, 2026

4 pm Guided Tours (German/English)
 

Saturday, Aug.²⁹, 2026

12:00 – 12:30 p.m. Online Talk: Soft Evidence Dynamics (German)
An online talk with Marie Therese Huth (she/her), an expert on hidden power dynamics in the arts and educational settings, and Anh Vu (she/her), an exhibiting artist. Both have post-COVID with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and will discuss the dynamics that concern them in the context of art.
The event is free. We would appreciate it if you could support Marie’s Hbot treatments with a donation via PayPal.
Please register to receive the Zoom meeting link.