Today, as I write this text, the exhibition is not yet in space. Agnieszka’s spheres appear only through documentation images of previous installations, Stephen’s work reaches me directly through the ear canal, resonating through my headphones. Contemplation, here, is mediated by intangibility. Yet even in absence, the works insist on material presence: imagining the puffed, percussive sounds of Agnieszka’s inflatables pressed against skin, walls, and one another, the possibility of movement itself emerges as a complicator of interaction or, in other words, of narrative, opening space for play and contingency.

Similarly, Stephen’s ASMR-like sound work, described by the artist as “what noise removal algorithms take away from voice to make it understandable and nice,” draws attention to the residual, suppressed, and peripheral dimensions of listening. Oscillating between intimacy and discomfort, the work explores the asymmetrical relations between those producing sound and those receiving it: the instability of being heard, acknowledged, or understood, and the uneasy power dynamics embedded within acts of listening themselves. Speaking here does not necessarily produce agency or satisfaction, just as listening becomes entangled with judgement, projection, and forms of parasocial desire particular to online cultures of attention.

As part of ‘Organ Works’, Lena Appel proposes a performance where the space’s lamellae become the stage for shadow theatre. Activated by light and movement, the installation projects shifting silhouettes across and in front of the gallery, transforming the space into a temporary screen. In the twilight after the dusky ghosts have departed, only their traces remain, leaving viewers to reconstruct the memory of an event that has already passed. In these works, I imagine notions of proximity and distance, visibility and invisibility, gathering at Hours to produce a collage of tensions. These extend into broader questions concerning the production of images, their containability, and contemporary modes of interaction. In this sense, the exhibition recalls the logic of staged disappearing acts such as those in The Vanishing Lady (1896), where disappearance functions as a meticulously engineered system of illusion and control, reminding us that what is made to vanish is always conditioned by the structures that determine visibility and legibility in the first place.

Stephen’s work inevitably recalls John Cage’s 4’33”, in which silence is never empty but always already populated by the environment and the listening subject. Echoing Jacques Attali’s understanding of sound as a system of order and regulation, McEvoy proposes listening as a form of introspection rather than spectacle, displacing visuality into the listener’s own imagination.

Conversely, Agnieszka’s inflatable spheres ask what sounds an image can produce. Rather than presenting themselves in totality, the sculptures emerge through fragments, partial views, and invitations to move around them. Here, sound depends upon tactility—or its refusal, while the inflated bodies subtly reconfigure the space they occupy, making presence contingent upon encounter.

Jeanne Eschert extends these questions into the live encounter, where disappearance unfolds through the fragile contract between performer and spectator. Working with sleight of hand, flash paper, poetry, and everyday objects, she exposes illusion as a mode of attention that slips beyond certainty. As gestures dissolve before they can be fully grasped, magic ceases to be the production of impossibility and instead becomes a rehearsal of perception itself, revealing how belief is produced through the body, memory, and shared acts of looking.

At last, I read online: “I am so sick of images.” The sentence comes to frame the exhibition less as a rejection of images than as a search for other forms of appearing. Across sculpture,

sound, performance, poetry, shadow theatre, and magic, disappearance becomes not an absence but a condition of relation. What vanishes is never simply lost; it returns through our projection.