Ameli M. Klein is the Director of Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany. Her work investigates the politics and poetics of truth, tracing how ideology inhabits forms, institutions, and collective memory. Using hauntology as a methodology, she recently concluded a nomadic exhibition cycle dedicated to Vernon Lee: Genius Loci: Notes on Places, with a forthcoming publication from Deutscher Kunstverlag. In 2026 she curated Fabricated Realities: Graphics at the Edge of Belief, the sixthedition of F.I.G. Festival for Illustration and Graphics in Sofia, Bulgaria. Klein is a 2027 Visiting Fellow at Bard Graduate Center, New York, US.
Scholarship 2026 - Ameli Klein Traces of the Ephemeral
Ameli Klein, Traces of the Ephemeral: Sigmar Polke's Venice Photographs as Hauntological Image Archive
How do images persist after the conditions of their production have disappeared? What remains when photographs lose their documentary certainty and become sites of ambiguity, transformation, and return?
My research examines these questions through a little-studied body of photographs made by Sigmar Polke during the preparation of Athanor for the German Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale.
Produced in and around the empty pavilion before the installation was completed, these photographs occupy an uncertain position within Polke’s practice. Neither straightforward documentation nor autonomous artworks, they emerged through processes of layering, multiple exposure, chemical intervention, and material accident. Rather than recording a stable reality, they transform the spaces they depict, dissolving architecture into light, atmosphere, and spectral traces. The camera becomes less an instrument of representation than a medium of transmutation.
My project approaches these photographs through the lens of hauntology, a concept developed by Jacques Derrida and later expanded by Mark Fisher to describe the persistence of the past within the present. Hauntology is concerned with traces, absences, and unresolved histories—those elements that continue to shape contemporary experience despite appearing lost or forgotten. Polke’s Venice photographs are hauntological objects in a particularly literal sense. They capture a space in the process of becoming, before the exhibition existed, while simultaneously rendering that space unstable through photographic and chemical transformation. They are images haunted by what has not yet happened and by what can no longer be fully recovered.
The project also considers the afterlife of these photographs. Although portions of the series were published in the Athanor catalogue and forty unique prints were distributed through the Museumsverein of Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, the ensemble has since become dispersed across private and institutional collections. Today, the photographs survive largely as fragments of a larger whole. Their circulation, dispersal, and partial disappearance form an important part of the research itself. Rather than treating the archive as a stable repository of knowledge, the project investigates how images accumulate meaning through movement, loss, and recontextualization.