What is the character of the places where we rest, stay or live? No transit rooms or identity-less buildings – but the real home, a shelter, place to stay, whether voluntarily chosen or urgently sought – is at the center of this exhibition. Formen des Bleibens (Forms of Remaining) brings together three positions that offer different perspectives on temporary housing, family possessions and home-made shelters.

Against the background of Asian megacities, the works of World-Press-Award winner Peter Bialobrzeski Case Study Homes and The Raw and the Cooked portray the human desire for a home of one’s own. The will to survive and creativity emerge both in the slum dwellings built from rubbish as well as in the handcrafted ‘vernacular architecture’, that utilizes found building materials.

The series Wenn Du gehen Musst (When you have to go), was shot in the home of Nina Röder's deceased grandparents before it was sold. As Sudeten-German refugees and part of the wartime generation, the two have all their life lifted everything and almost nothing thrown away. Their house in the Franconian Windsbach, where they lived after their escape for over half a century, was the center and meeting point for Röder's family. Thus, this work not only examines the aesthetic plurality of collected objects of her grandparents, but shows with the stylistic device of absurdity a possible approach to loss, grief and remorse.

Along with the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, the number of attacks on refugee shelters had increased dramatically. For two years, Henriette Kriese travelled across Germany for her series Aus Angst um das Schöne (Out of fear for beauty) and visited some of these sites. The resulting photographs do not function as conventional crime scene images, they serve rather as an examination of the question of how to deal with these places after the attacks and which traces can still be found two years later.

Formen des Bleibens points out the immense diversity of our understanding of the term home - whether it is a temporary or a long-term inhabited and emotionally charged one – as a place of here and now, a description of our situation. Where and how we live and stay cannot always be chosen freely, but as different as it may be – it will have an impact on us.