Persistence of Vision Turns Photography Into Atmosphere

Persistence of Vision, which opened at Berlin’s Gropius Bau on March 19, 2026, feels less like a conventional photography survey than a lesson in attention. Bringing together more than a century of visual thinking across two very different practices, the exhibition pairs the late Peter Hujar, the great chronicler of queer downtown New York, with Liz Deschenes, whose works test the outer limits of what photography can be. It is the first major exhibition in Berlin for both artists, and the result is unusually precise: a show about pictures that keeps pushing beyond the image.

Curated by Eva Respini with Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino, Persistence of Vision rejects chronology in favor of relation. Several rooms revive the dense grid logic of Hujar’s final self-curated 1986 exhibition at Gracie Mansion Gallery, where portraits, nudes, animals, and ruins hung in a tight formation that resisted hierarchy. At Gropius Bau, that strategy returns as a way of refusing the single “masterpiece” effect. Hujar’s photographs form a constellation of lives and places, while Deschenes’ interventions arrive like interruptions in the flow, slowing the eye and shifting attention toward light, chemistry, surface, and time.

The strongest rooms are built on unexpected correspondences. Hujar’s pictures of urban ruins and abandoned piers sit beside Deschenes’ Retaining sculptures, delicate cast-glass forms inspired by scaffolding systems used to stabilize unstable historic buildings. The pairing resonates sharply inside Gropius Bau itself, a building marked by wartime damage and restoration. Elsewhere, nocturnal photographs of New York meet Deschenes’ camera-less photograms, made by exposing black-and-white paper to outdoor light at night. In both cases, darkness becomes a medium rather than a backdrop.

That material sensitivity gives the exhibition its charge. Deschenes’ works remain responsive to ambient light and continue to shift through oxidation and environmental exposure, turning photography into something durational and unstable. Hujar’s portraits of figures such as Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, and William S. Burroughs bring another kind of instability: the fragility of bodies, scenes, and entire worlds. Together, the two artists share what the show frames as an uncompromising clarity of vision.

The Berlin Persistence of Vision presentation also folds into a larger Hujar moment in Germany. In partnership with Gropius Bau, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn is showing Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark through August 23, 2026, while Gropius Bau extends the experience with its free Spätschicht x C/O Berlin evening on March 26, part of an ongoing monthly late-night series.