Thomas Kellner curates a group exhibition for the Pingyao International Photography Festival 2025 in China

Pingyao, China. As part of the prestigious Pingyao International Photography Festival 2025, the German fine art photographer and curator Thomas Kellner presents the group exhibition Where Time’s Echoes Repeat. This exhibition brings together seven international artists who, from various artistic perspectives, explore how memory continues to reverberate through images. The works in this show are connected not by a superficial thematic unity, but by a sensitively composed inner affinity. Their resonance emerges from the tension between individual approaches and collective horizons of experience.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the concept of echo, that reverberation of the past that shapes our current way of seeing. Memory is not presented here as a closed archive, but as an open framework in which both subjective and societal histories are just as present as atmospheric traces, materialities, and inscriptions. The photographs displayed in this exhibition open up transitional spaces between permanence and transience, between visibility and concealment, between humanity and nature.

For example, Galina Kurlat, Stig Marlon Weston, and Falk von Traubenberg explore the natural world as a space for memory. Kurlat’s lumen prints are created through the direct exposure of light on light-sensitive paper. This camera-less process captures fleeting states, preserving the atmospheric and engraving time itself into the image. Weston’s photographic gaze is turned toward the Amazon, whose fragile ecosystems have been altered by human interventions. His images document slow processes of change that reveal themselves not dramatically, but in small, often overlooked traces. Von Traubenberg, on the other hand, reflects on the landscape as a cultural memory. By referencing and simultaneously deconstructing the romantic iconography of Caspar David Friedrich, he opens up abstract pictorial spaces where nature can be read as a projection surface of historical significance. The urban and social dimensions of memory also play a key role. Ari Salomon addresses the traces of the COVID-19 pandemic in urban spaces. His photographs show abandoned places, makeshift barriers, and empty vistas that do not depict emptiness per se but rather an atmosphere of absence and uncertainty. Jolana Havelková, meanwhile, turns to textiles that act as carriers of lived experience. These fabrics become more than material: they transform into touchable archives, making personal stories and societal inscriptions visible.

Frauke Thielking offers a playful, poetic perspective. In her photographs, the act of a child’s exploration of the world becomes an aesthetic gesture. These are fleeting, improvised moments of wonder that do not aim for permanence but celebrate the ephemeral. Memory here does not reside in the monument, but in the moment of play.

Litera responds to societal upheavals by shifting familiar everyday objects into new contexts. Through materials like Carrera race tracks, plaster, and found objects, she creates complex installations that resist easy interpretation. Litera’s work reflects a fragmented present, where upheaval, play, and critique overlap. The resulting image spaces appear as unstable systems in which transformation itself becomes the subject.

Where Time’s Echoes Repeat does not unfold a closed narrative, but rather a multilayered web of relationships. The individual works do not confront each other as isolated positions, but engage in a resonant dialogue. In its entirety, the exhibition creates a space in which perspectives intersect, memories intensify, and new constellations become visible.

Where Time’s Echoes Repeat
September 19 to 23, 2025
Pingyao, Republic of China

Exhibited artists: Galina Kurlat, Frauke Thielking, Ari Salomon, Jolana Havelková, Stig Marlon Weston, Litera, Falk von Traubenberg
Curator: Thomas Kellner

Then subscribe to the newsletter!