EN HIVER II
The Subject of the Air
Ludwig Dressler, Ossian Fraser, Sophie Schweighart
12. February - 14 March 2026
The second chapter of EN HIVER now presents The Subject of the Air, Ossian Fraser’s ephemeral balloon sculpture, within a group exhibition alongside works by Ludwig Dressler and Sophie Schweighart. The exhibition engages with questions of materiality, scale, and perception, unfolding within the tension between image, space, and physical presence. What unites these distinct practices is a shared sensitivity to weight, fragility, and the fleeting nature of the moment. At its core lies a reflection on time, memory, and the delicate presence of human experience.
With The Subject of the Air, Fraser’s black balloon traverses the boundary of the photographic, entering the gallery as a spatial intervention. What previously existed as an image within a photographic triptych now materializes as a sculptural event. At once ominous and fragile, its presence unsettles habitual modes of perception and opens an experiential field beyond fixed reference. The black balloon appears almost weightless, evoking cosmic associations. Expanding up to four meters in both height and diameter, it occupies public space while remaining simultaneously monumental and distant. Previously presented during Various Others 2025, it hovered above the roof of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich, where it manifested in nocturnal photographs as an ambivalent entity suspended between monumentality and fragility. The work conjures images of celestial bodies, black holes, and objects that resist terrestrial grounding. Upon entering the gallery, the balloon becomes an immediate, bodily presence. Anchored three-dimensionally within space, it stretches, defines, and renegotiates its limits. Its materiality and spatial impact transform the exhibition space into an immersive environment in which perception oscillates between the real and the unknown.
Within the gallery, The Subject of the Air is also presented as a triptych from differing perspectives. This tripartite configuration opens a space suggestive of another dimension: perception is both disrupted and expanded, as if the balloon could not be grasped from a single viewpoint but instead unfolds through the interplay of three. What emerges is an image-body suspended between reality and the unfamiliar.Another work presents a white weather balloon hovering above Heinrich Heine’s crypt in Munich’s Dichtergarten—like an oversized, enigmatic egg caught in the moment between ascent and descent. Fraser’s balloons operate as metaphors of transition: they move between visibility and invisibility, between physical gravity and metaphysical dissolution. They mark sites without binding themselves to them, silent emissaries of a universe that appears at once unfathomable and intimately tangible.
With the series Nothing is real but okay, Sophie Schweighart turns her attention to a site that is at once banal and profoundly human: the so-called “fake bus stop”—a pseudo stop installed in many care facilities for people living with dementia. Equipped with a bus stop sign, a fictional timetable, and sometimes a simple bench, it imitates everyday infrastructure without ever fulfilling its function. No bus will ever arrive here, no journey will begin—yet these places open up a space that often feels closer to an inner truth than any functioning system of transport.
For people with dementia, whose short-term memory becomes increasingly fragile and whose present is ever more saturated with memories, these bus stops possess a consoling logic. Many long to return to a familiar place, often the site of their childhood, or follow deeply ingrained rituals anchored in bodily memory. The fake bus stop offers precisely what reality no longer can: the promise of returning home. Often, a brief moment of waiting is enough for restlessness to subside, for the original impulse to leave to dissolve into the fog of memory. Some return to the care facility convinced they have embarked on, or even completed a journey.
Schweighart takes this paradoxical gesture—the bus stop as a threshold between fiction and existential truth, as the starting point of her artistic practice. Her photographs and installations reveal how time, identity, and space shift at these sites. The fake bus stop becomes a poetic focal point of a condition in which the past becomes present and the present gently dissolves.
Schweighart photographs these stops in fog or at night, creating an atmosphere that is both estranged and deeply evocative. By placing the modest architecture of these sites at the center of her work, Schweighart exposes the fragility of human orientation and the tender, often overlooked longing for home, belonging, and stability. Her works open a space of quiet empathy—a meditation on what memory truly is, and on how we accompany one another when it begins to disintegrate.
Ludwig Dressler investigates the everyday gestures of the digital age: swiping, zooming, and scrolling across smartphone screens. His light boxes and photographs isolate these fleeting actions and translate them into an unfamiliar, condensed materiality—making the ephemeral visible and physically perceptible.
The smooth, reflective surfaces of the pinch_inverted series produce distorted reflections of both the viewer and the surrounding space. The environment appears fractured, stretched, or displaced—as though one were looking into a digital membrane that fragments reality while simultaneously reflecting it back. Space itself seems drawn into the gesture.
At the same time, the hand that originally performs the digital movement dissolves within these surfaces. It merges with them, becoming a blurred trace, a hybrid entity between body and device. The boundary between human and technology erodes; the hand becomes part of the system it operates, as if it had migrated into the digital surface itself.
This is particularly striking in Dressler’s three-dimensional photographs: the gesture of the fingers causes the photographic paper itself to bulge. The physical surface begins to bend, as though following the digital movement. The gesture inscribes itself as a sculptural deformation into the image, revealing how intimately body and medium are intertwined.
In this way, Dressler transforms the fleeting micro-gestures of everyday life into fragile sculptures of light, reflection, distortion, and movement. His works reveal how deeply embedded we are in our digital actions—and how quietly, almost imperceptibly, our own self-image shifts along with them. One work from the pinch_ series has been acquired by the Collection for Time-Based Media at the Pinakothek der Moderne (headed by Franziska Kunze) and will be shown there in a group exhibition in July 2025.
Ludwig Dressler (b. 1998, Munich) explores the impact of digital media on human perception and behavior. Working across photography, video, and 3D animation, his practice combines technical precision with aesthetic clarity. He frequently uses his own body—particularly his hand—to investigate the tension between physical presence and technological abstraction.
Ossian Fraser (b. 1983, Edinburgh) captures fleeting moments through materials such as water, dust, and light. His site-specific interventions in both urban and natural environments reveal the latent potential of everyday situations. Fraser’s work merges sculpture, performance, and photography, documenting brief yet resonant compositions that examine the relationship between architecture, nature, and the ephemerality of the moment.
Sophie Schweighart (b. 1991, Munich) is a media artist who intertwines cinematic and physical realities. Her interactive works question perception and power structures by dissolving the boundaries between reality and performance. Through installations and performances, Schweighart invites critical reflection on established orders, combining narrative depth with spatial presence to create new forms of interaction.