Past Exhibition

The Columns Gallery is pleased to present Doubleday by German artist Michael Wesely at Hive Art Fair Seoul 2026. Bringing together past and present, stillness and motion, and the tangible and intangible through the medium of photography, the exhibition reflects Wesely’s long-standing investigation into time, memory, and transformation.

Alexanderplatz, Berlin (1946/2023), ArchiveInkJet-Print

Over the past three decades, Wesely has developed a singular photographic practice centered on what photography can reveal about time itself. Working with specially designed cameras of his own invention, whose technical mechanisms remain undisclosed, he extends photographic exposure across months and years, allowing architecture, human presence, and historical change to accumulate within a single image. People dissolve into traces, buildings rise and disappear, flowers bloom and wither, while time itself becomes visible.

In 2001, at the invitation of Museum of Modern Art, Wesely documented the museum’s three-year renovation through continuous long-exposure photographs, compressing an entire institutional transformation into a small number of images. In Doubleday, this exploration reaches one of its most profound realizations.

Französische Straße Ecke Mauerstraße, Berlin (1929/2023), ArchiveInkJet-Print

Drawing from Germany’s photographic archives, including images dating back to 1865, Wesely returned to the exact locations from which historical photographs had originally been taken and superimposed his own photographs made in 2023 directly over them. Two centuries coexist within a single visual surface. Architecture shifts, streets disappear, and human histories overlap, yet the structure of the city quietly persists beneath the layers of time.

Following presentations in Berlin and Singapore, Doubleday now arrives in Seoul, a city whose transformation has been equally dramatic, yet one that retains comparatively few photographic traces of its own rapid urban changes. Wesely’s work resonates powerfully in Seoul, where layers of disappearance, reconstruction, and memory continue to shape the contemporary city.

Mühlendamm, Berlin (1886/2023), ArchiveInkJet-Print

Printed as large-format Archive Inkjet Prints without glass, the works possess a remarkable physical immediacy. Viewers encounter the image directly, without mediation, standing before surfaces where history, memory, and time converge.

Doubleday premiered in Berlin in 2024 and was later presented at the Museum für Fotografie Berlin. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition was published by Hatje Cantz (136 pages, German/English).

Lehter Bahnhof, Berlin (1885/2023), 2024, Diasec colour pigment print

We invite you to experience the captivating work of Michael Wesely and witness how photography can hold time itself.