There is a photograph by Peter Hujar — *David Wojnarowicz (Hand Touching Eye)*, 1981 — in which a hand reaches toward a face, fingers half-obscuring the gaze. It is a picture about seeing and being seen, about the vulnerability of the act itself. That Gropius Bau chose this image to lead the publicity for *Persistence of Vision* tells you something about curatorial intent. This is not a retrospective that treats Hujar as a sainted martyr of the downtown scene. It is an exhibition about what happens when you look, and what the medium of photography does to the looking.

Opening on 18 March, *Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision* brings together around 120 of Hujar's photographs — many shown for the first time in Berlin — alongside sculptural and photographic works by Liz Deschenes. The pairing is not obvious. Hujar, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1987 at fifty-three, made fiercely intimate black-and-white portraits of the people and places that constituted New York's queer and artistic underground between Stonewall and the plague years. Deschenes, born in 1966, makes work that barely resembles photography in any conventional sense: photograms exposed to moonlight, glass sculptures that shift with the viewer's position, surfaces that continue to oxidise long after they leave the darkroom. One made Candy Darling on her deathbed. The other makes silver paper slowly changing in ambient light. The exhibition argues these practices share a root.

Hujar's biography reads like a compressed history of mid-century American photography. Raised by Ukrainian immigrant grandparents in rural New Jersey, he picked up his mother's camera as a child and never really put it down. A move to New York at twelve, a Fulbright to Italy in 1962, a visit to the Palermo Catacombs — reportedly with the artist Paul Thek — that seeded his preoccupation with mortality. By the 1970s he was living and working in the East Village, making portraits of Susan Sontag, Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling — a circle that reads now as canonical but at the time was simply the neighbourhood. Hujar's great skill was a refusal to mythologise. His subjects look back at the camera with a directness that feels almost confrontational, stripped of the soft-focus romanticism that plagued so much queer portraiture of the era. As he reportedly described his own practice: "uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects." That clarity is the thread the curators pull on.

Deschenes' work demands a different kind of attention — and makes a different kind of claim. Trained at Rhode Island School of Design, she has spent decades stripping photography back to its material conditions: light hitting a chemically sensitive surface, time passing, oxidation accumulating. Her *Elevations* and *Green Screen* series treat colour as subject rather than attribute, producing monochrome works that sit ambiguously between image and object. More recent photograms are made by exposing paper to natural and artificial light outdoors at night — no camera, no lens, no subject in the traditional sense. The resulting surfaces are silvery, tonal, shifting. If Hujar's radicalism was social — insisting on the full dignity of people the mainstream preferred not to see — Deschenes' radicalism is ontological. She asks whether the photograph even needs a referent, and her answer is a surface that keeps reacting to light long after the artist has walked away.

The curatorial logic, then, is not biographical but phenomenological. Both artists are interested in what photography does before it becomes a picture of something. For Hujar, the decisive act was the encounter — the charged space between his lens and a living face, a dying animal, a crumbling wall. For Deschenes, it is the medium's own physics: photons, silver halide, entropy. The curators — Eva Respini of Vancouver Art Gallery and Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino of Gropius Bau — have structured the exhibition so that Deschenes' works are interspersed among Hujar's photographs as "interludes", punctuation marks that ask the viewer to slow down, to become conscious of the act of looking between one image and the next. Deschenes' glass pieces introduce literal reflection: the viewer sees themselves, the room, other visitors folded into the surface of the artwork. The architecture of Gropius Bau — that Italian Neo-Renaissance shell rebuilt from wartime ruin, where reconstructed mosaics sit alongside deliberately exposed gaps in the masonry — becomes a third presence. A building that carries its own damage visibly is a pointed context for work concerned with light, loss, and what persists.

It matters that this is happening in Berlin, and it matters that it is happening now. Hujar has had a strange posthumous trajectory. Largely underappreciated during his lifetime — he published one book, *Portraits in Life and Death*, in 1976, with an essay by Susan Sontag, and it did not sell — he was gradually canonised in the decades after his death, as the cultural significance of the downtown New York scene he documented became impossible to ignore. Major retrospectives have appeared at the Morgan Library (2017) and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, among others, but Berlin has until now lacked a comprehensive showing. That the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn is simultaneously running *Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark* suggests a coordinated German institutional reckoning with the work — two cities, two framings, positioning Hujar within European photographic discourse rather than leaving him as a chapter in New York art history.

Deschenes' inclusion complicates any temptation to treat the show as pure memorial. Her work resists nostalgia structurally. You cannot be sentimental about a photogram exposed to moonlight; it has no face, no story, no death. What it has is a relationship to time that is ongoing — oxidation means the work is literally still changing on the wall. Placed beside Hujar's portraits of people many of whom died young, this temporal instability becomes its own kind of elegy: not for a person, but for the idea that any image is ever finished.

The opening evening on 18 March is free, with a DJ set — a gesture toward sociability that echoes Hujar's own immersion in a scene where art, music, and nightlife were not separate categories. It is a fitting entry point for an exhibition that spans Hujar's full career, from early 1950s experiments to the final studio works, threaded through with Deschenes' interventions.

The phrase "persistence of vision" is borrowed from optics — the phenomenon by which the retina retains an image briefly after the source is gone. It is what makes cinema possible: the brain stitches still frames into continuous motion because each image lingers a fraction of a second beyond its exposure. As a title for an exhibition pairing a dead photographer with a living one, it suggests that what we see does not end when we look away. The afterimage remains. In a building that once burned and was rebuilt, in a city that lives in the gap between what was and what is, that is not metaphor. It is material fact.