IN ABSENTIA

“In Absentia” by Matthias Koch is a silent meditation on what remains when everything recedes. These austere, hypnotic images do not document absence—they make it speak. Each photograph reveals a presence stronger than appearances: an abandoned chair, a worn wall, light crossing a forgotten space. Nothing spectacular, yet everything breathes.

Koch doesn’t show deserted places, but spaces where life has withdrawn, leaving behind its trace, its breath. Time feels suspended, as if caught in an in-between—a fragile tension between presence and disappearance.

These images are not empty; they are full of what has vanished. Silence becomes the loudest voice, questioning what makes something be. Shadows, textures, and light do not just describe—they evoke. What we see hints at what escapes us.

To contemplate them is to enter a void that isn’t one: a fertile space, a call to imagine, to feel. The inanimate becomes eloquent, bearers of a hidden life still pulsing beneath the visible.

With In Absentia, Koch captures not the world as it is, but as it withdraws—where absence reveals a deeper truth, and where we, as viewers, become witnesses to the delicate mystery of being.