About Kaveh Hosseini
Kaveh Hosseini, born in 1982 in Tabriz, Iran, has lived and worked in Germany since 2001. As a photographer and artist, he does not see his work as an attempt to capture the world, but rather as a pursuit to grasp the unspeakable – that flickering boundary between being and nothingness, between what exists at the moment of perception and what endlessly eludes it. For Hosseini, the world as we experience it is not what it truly is, but what we believe it to be. In this alienation, in this constant shift between perception and reality, he finds the true core of his art.
His photographs are not simple depictions of the world, but snapshots of time in the act of decay. Each image is a reflection of the transient, the dissolution of form and meaning. It is not about what is visible in the image, but what lies behind the surface, in the darkness beyond perception – what lingers in the unknown and dissolves in the cracks between things.
For Hosseini, analog photography is a dialogue with time itself. The film, as material, is not just a carrier of light but an active participant in the memory process. In its grain and the irregularities of the development process, the laws of decay are reflected – the impermanence of the medium, which manifests in every frame. Each image becomes a fragment of memory, a moment of transition from presence to absence.
Digital photography, on the other hand, transcends this physical decay, yet in its apparent perfection lies its own form of alienation. It is the dematerialization of reality, a fragmenting of the world that manifests through the medium. In digital work, it is not about preserving the world, but questioning it and exploring it in its fragility – beyond form, beyond time.
In his portraits, Hosseini is not seeking the likeness of a person, but rather what lies beneath the surface – the essence of being that can only be glimpsed as a fragment. The faces he captures are not complete representations, but moments of absence, of constant dissolution.
The photographs of Kaveh Hosseini are not answers to the great questions of existence. They are rather the attempt to capture the incomprehensible in a fleeting moment – that which lies between the answers, that which continually eludes our understanding. They are a look at the world as it slips away in the moment of perception, a glimpse into the emptiness between things, which offers neither comfort nor insight, but returns us to the mystery of existence.