Millennium School is the first book by Krzysztof Zielinski one of the most interesting photographers of the young generation of Polish photographers. The photographs focus on the primary school which he attended as a child in the small Polish town of Wabrzezno. The school itself, Primary School no 3, was built in 1962 as a part of a major government development masterplan - - 'A thousand schools for the thousand years of the Polish state'. This is why these schools were called 'millennium memorial schools'. Essentially a propaganda plan, the new schools were presented as a gift from the Communist party to the nation, even though the post-war demographic boom meant that they were a necessity. Built around standard layouts, usually two or three storeys and constructed from prefabricated concrete, they were designed to be adaptable for military purposes with many having underground shelters and capable of being converted into temporary hospitals. Compared with the standards of the 60s, the schools were modern and well-equipped, and being a student at one was regarded as a sort of distinction. Today, the splendour of millennium schools is long forgotten. Physically, little has changed over the past twenty years, the furniture and equipment are the same, though as if to hide the passage of time and their modest and now outdated facilities, the classrooms have been painted in vivid colours.

A central pillar of Daniel Lie's artistic practice is time - ranging from age-old memories to the beginning of the world, from the life span of a human being to the geological time of the elements. Lie's art explores concepts such as life, death, and decay, as well as biographical relationships and heritage, with an approach that centres around personal memories, family stories, cultural objects, and natural products that survive for a long time and are linked to memories of the past. Taking a lifetime as a comparative measure, the works are inspired by developmental processes and the transition from one state to another. Installations, sculptures, and a combination of different media reveal the performative qualities of the referential objects - time, transience, and presence. Lie turns a spotlight on these three aspects by creating complex installations and giving pride of place to organic elements that grow and age and have life cycles of their own, such as plants and fungi. Engaging in an interdisciplinary exchange with mycologists, archaeologists, and environmental specialists, Lie addresses the fault lines in binary thought patterns such as science and religion, past origins and present existence, life and death, while attempting to subvert them.

Gladys Kalichini (born 1989 in Chingola, Zambia) is a contemporary visual artist and academic who investigates how women have been portrayed in relation to a dominant, colonial past. For example, the artist sheds light on instances in which women have been deleted from historical narratives and the collective memory of society. As a result of her extensive research, Kalichini has demonstrated that women were intentionally marginalised in the official representations of Zambia's and Zimbabwe's struggles for independence. In her elaborate multimedia installations and video art, which she often develops on the basis of research material and photos from archives, Kalichini highlights the omissions in the dominant representations of the two countries' fight for freedom. She thus expands the history of their liberation struggle by drawing attention to the deletion and invisibility of female freedom fighters. By reminding the public of several of these women, Kalichini creates a diverse and complex alternative narrative of national independence.

In her art, Gaëlle Choisne (*1985, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) addresses the world’s complexity with its numerous political and cultural crises – such as the overexploitation of nature and natural resources or the consequences of colonialism and the scars it has left. Her works are often designed as collaborative projects that evolve over years and are continuously redefined at changing locations and with varying participants. Choisne’s long-term project Temple of love – To hide is based on the idea of self-healing through sharing our experience with others, through our connection with our ancestors, respect for our historical heritage, and an inner physical balance. In a number of interviews, she asked female and transfeminine people about their situation as racialised women in contemporary society, including several women who have developed the ability to “heal� through various methods and techniques: for example, by creating communities or through family care, music, or “alternative� medicine. Her installation, composed of video projections and objects, presents itself as a safe space which highlights self-care and caring for others. Visitors are invited to participate in an energetic healing process or to drink soothing concoctions.

Lubomir Typlt (*1975) is one of the well-known representatives of contemporary Czech figurative painting. The pictures of the former A.R. Penck student captivate with their expressive colours, heavy brushstrokes and his relentless view of the human form. The catalogue Somnambul assembles his latest images in which adolescent girls and boys oscillate between fear and aggression, captivity and freedom, as well as isolation and solidarity. Typlt’s visual worlds are relentless, angular metaphors. They appear terrifying, but admonish that nothing can be more terrible than ignorance and numbness.

There is something magical about these photographs; they show faces as they have never before been seen. The 360-degree portraits by the artist duo Koschies deconstruct familiar occidental views. They are not structured around a vanishing point, but instead take place entirely in the planar dimension. With their fascinating time-slit camera recordings, the artists enter into new visual terrain - not on the basis of digital manipulation, but through creatively making use of the influence of time in the pictures themselves. Just as Impressionist pictorial forms in their day came as a shock to the perception of academically trained viewers of art, these portraits act as a substantial challenge to the eyes of their late modern addressees, whose eyes have been inundated with traditional photography.

In his new catalogue Ballad for Space Lovers, the artist Sebastian Hosu (*1988) traces his creative work of the past years since completing his master class studies in Leipzig. The centre of the creative work and life of the Romanian-born artist is the old Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (cotton-spinning mill), one of the most important artist centres in Germany of our time. Hosu’s pictures are distinguished by an expressive characteristic style, as if created in just one single breath. His dynamic, often flesh-coloured forms give rise to the suggestion of bodies and flow into a living natural environment. Whether luminous oil painting or charcoal drawings — Hosu’s pictorial works have a strong physical presence and take viewers along with them on a journey through space and time. Text in English and German.