Launch: Absence

Showcasing the photography of what isn’t

Stable Gallery, in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, is delighted to launch a new group exhibition, curated by sociologists Laura Harris and Maike Pötschulat. Absence brings together the photography of seven visual sociologists, alongside finalists from an open call for photography of absences in the Liverpool City Region.

Taking place from 5 June 2026 to 11 July 2026 at Liverpool’s Stable Gallery, St George’s Hall, the show explores absence as both a social reality and a visual language. Across more than 100 photographs, the show investigates absence’s many forms, asking: What does it mean to document what is no longer there, or those who are no longer present? How can we see what society leaves behind, or what never came to be? How can we photograph what resists to be shown?

Maike Pötschulat, one of the exhibition’s curators, said: ‘Absence is not emptiness. Often, what appears to be absent can have a large footprint in our lives and societies while generating a whole host of activities. In this exhibition, we wanted to focus on the ways in which absence is lived, felt and practised to show what materialises in the gaps and voids that are left by an absence.’

The exhibition includes:

• Terence Heng’s photography of Bukit Brown Cemetery, a Chinese diaspora graveyard in Singapore, exploring death, one of the most evocative forms of absence. Heng’s work highlights how loss is a futile ground for collective beliefs and practices.
• A selection of Setareh Kazemi’s photojournalistic work in Iran, with a focus on the lives of women and migrant communities who rarely find representation. Her work is a reminder of the power of photography to make visible experiences and people that are frequently overlooked.
• Manal Massalha’s Standing Tall series, which documents Palestinian life and hardship in the Occupied Territories in the West Bank. Here, absence is not a noun but a verb, where a process of violent ‘absenting’ is inflicted on Palestinian communities and lands.
• An extract of David Schalliol’s Isolated Building Studies, selected from a portfolio of over 700 images. As a broader commentary on urban and social change in Chicago, these images feature stand-alone buildings that are the last, or first, remnants of physical and social neighbourhoods.
• Makeshift, in which Paweł Starzec revisits sites of the Bosnian War with the muted pastel aesthetic of his photography in stark contrast to the atrocities that happened in the photographed places. Starzec’s work is a critical commentary on the way power manipulates what and who is remembered.
• Gesche Würfel’s The Absence and Presence of The Berlin Wall, a comprehensive research project that speaks to the traces of the wall in material and psychic terms. We exhibit composite images that were created on Würfel’s cycle along the 160km Berlin Wall Trail.
• Five polaroids, all of which for unknown reasons shed their owners and now exist alongside the 4000 images in Kyler Zeleny’s Found Polaroid archive. While their original context is forever lost, the displayed polaroids feature flash fiction that was written to reanimate them.
• Running alongside the exhibition are the submissions from an Open Call for Photography of absence in the Liverpool City Region, which generated hundreds of images that highlight how absence is woven into the built and social fabric of the area. Five finalists, whose work is exhibited, are:

• Daniel Frost
• Alishah Iqbal
• Paradise Made
• Dan Murphy
• Claire Weetman

An accompanying special issue of Open Eye Gallery’s magazine, TILT, will launch at the opening of the exhibition. The magazine features specially commissioned texts on the theme of absence, and an expanded selection of images from the open call and every photographer’s project. TILT will be available online for free at Open Eye Gallery’s website, or in print from their bookshop (£5). The magazine will also feature images received through the open call by:

• Ellie Byrne
• Angela Cheveau
• Alan Colclough
• Emily Gerrard
• Jean Kane
• Nicolas Kendall
• June Poston
• Andrew Stewart
• Andrew Wilson

Funded by the British Academy’s BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Programme and Liverpool John Moores University’s FSC Research Development Fund, the exhibition also includes a series of public events including curatorial tours and panel discussions.

With support from: The British Academy, Liverpool John Moores University, Open Eye Gallery, Stable Gallery, University of Southampton.

Image credits: David Schalliol – Isolated Building Studies