ABWESENHEIT — the German word for “absence” — gives its title to this memorial exhibitiondedicated to the work and legacy of Chema Alvargonzalez. Conceived to mark the 20th anniversary of GlogauAIR, the international artist residency programme founded by the artist in Berlin, the exhibition offers a reflection on memory, time, permanence and transformation.
Installed within the historic GlogauAIR building — formerly Chema Alvargonzalez’s home and studio, and now an international residency space — the exhibition establishes a dialogue between artwork, architecture and memory. The building itself assumes a central role within the exhibition, revealing itself as a space layered with experiences, past presences and enduring absences.

Absence, the exhibition’s guiding concept, is presented not as emptiness but as a form of presence. It emerges through traces left by time, inhabited spaces, objects that remain and memories that resist disappearance. Staircases, windows, corridors and the GlogauAIR garden become active elements within a narrative where reality and imagination continuously intersect. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to explore territories of fragmented memory, incomplete narratives and experiences that resist full representation. The unknown, the imperceptible and the forgotten are approached not as deficiencies but as spaces of potential meaning.
Bringing together installation, photography, sculpture, light and sound, the exhibition highlights the multidisciplinary nature of Chema Alvargonzalez’s artistic practice. Among the works presented are his iconic suitcases, recurring elements throughout his oeuvre that function as symbols of travel, displacement and transformation. Within this context, they also acquire a metaphorical dimension, evoking the passage between presence and absence, memory and forgetting.
For the first time, a selection of the artist’s working documents and archival materials is also being presented. These materials offer a more intimate insight into his creative process without attempting to construct a linear biographical narrative. Instead, they reveal interruptions, gaps and silences, underscoring the fragmentary nature of memory itself.
The exhibition’s sonic and luminous dimensions further amplify this experience, creating atmospheres that oscillate between the tangible and the ephemeral. Light does not fully reveal; sound does not follow a linear narrative. Both operate as subtle presences accompanying visitors through a space where time appears suspended, accumulating different layers of past and present.
Within the context of GlogauAIR’s 20th anniversary, ABWESENHEIT serves simultaneously as a tribute to its founder and a reflection on continuity and legacy. Over the past two decades, the institution has welcomed hundreds of artists from around the world, becoming a place of encounter, creation and cultural exchange. Today, these countless temporary presences intertwine with the permanent absence of Chema Alvargonzalez, generating a poetic tension that permeates the entire exhibition.
More than an act of commemoration, ABWESENHEIT seeks to reactivate memory. Rather than closing a legacy, it sets it in motion. Rather than fixing a definitive narrative, it opens new possibilities for interpretation and understanding.
The exhibition invites visitors to inhabit that intermediate territory where past and present coexist, where the visible and the invisible converge, and where absence is transformed into a powerful form of presence.

ABOUT CHEMA ALVARGONZALEZ
Chema Alvargonzalez (b. 1960 Jerez de la Frontera, Spain – d. 2009 Berlin, Germany) developed a multidisciplinary artistic practice centred on themes of travel, displacement, memory and transformation. Working across installation, photography, sculpture, light and sound, he created a distinctive poetic language often associated with notions of movement, transition and mobility.
Alongside his artistic career, he founded GlogauAIR, an international residency programme that has become an important reference point within Berlin’s contemporary art scene, welcoming artists from across the globe and fostering cultural and creative exchange.