Exhibitions views from Anaïs Horn, Apousia, Fotohof Salzburg, 2025. 

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In the near-darkness of the room, countless photographs of missing cat posters hang—fragile remnants of absence, ephemeral traces of longing, affixed to lampposts, walls, and shop windows. They seem to emerge directly from the urban environment, weathered, yellowed, half-torn, and secured with tattered tape.

Apousia—Greek for absence—serves not only as the title of this work but as its defining principle. These posters, each a desperate attempt to reclaim a lost loved one, are marks of absence: names called out into the void, places marked by the undetectable trace of disappearance. The photographs, collected by Horn over a period of four years in various locations worldwide, reflect a universal pain. They not only capture the posters themselves but also incorporate fragments of the environments in which they are placed. Image within image within image they reflect both loss and the urban landscape that frames it, giving them a sense of being at once deeply personal and broadly collective.

Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, absence here is not merely the opposite of presence but its very condition. The posters attempt to fill the void with language and image, but something remains elusive.

The title Apousia encapsulates a central tension in Horn's practice: the interplay of presence and withdrawal, of the traces that remain of what is missing. Her work frequently operates within the interstitial space between narration and fragment, memory and forgetting. In Apousia, absence is not merely acknowledged but made tangible. The darkness of the room amplifies the intangible quality of absence—the missing beloved cats are not here, not anymore, and perhaps, never again. Their images persist, directed at an anonymous gaze, at a passerby who might glance, then move on, without pause. These traces remain, yet they no longer lead back to an origin, and their meaning drifts further away, suspended in a void.
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Installation views: kunstdokumentation.com

Rainer Iglar, Fotohof