Wir vom Mittleren Ring, 2024

Olaf Wiehler x Sascha Hausmann
A collaboration of photography and abstraction

In MITTLERER RING, Olaf Wiehler and Sascha Hausmann explore how people shape their living spaces and how art can connect us to each other. Photography and sculpture enter a dialogue, where each artist responds to the other’s work, creating layers of perception, touch, and transformation. The collaboration celebrates openness, curiosity, and the shared process of making, rather than fixed authorship or manifesto.

The project started from a shared connection to the Munich district of Giesing and a desire to engage with human habitats and resources through art. While there is no shared political agenda, both artists see their work as a way to turn towards others, to notice, show, and meet each other – a counterforce to emotional isolation, especially in the city.

Respect for the other’s artistic autonomy is central, combined with the impulse to enrich the work with one’s own gestures. This mutual curiosity allows the collaboration to grow organically beyond individual authorship. The simultaneity of perspectives creates emotional depth and tension, where contradictions open rather than resist.

Wiehler’s photographs in the MITTLERER RING series focus on people in their immediate surroundings, capturing those who shape their urban spaces despite limited alternatives. His images give presence and dignity to these efforts, seeking to reveal hope and resilience in everyday life.

Hausmann intervenes sculpturally, treating Wiehler’s photographs with materials such as fabric, putty, acrylic, folding rules, and construction foam. These additions surround, frame, and sometimes obscure the figures, emphasizing both the constraints of urban life and the tenderness that can exist within it. Tubular gauze wraps wounds like a gentle bandage – a reminder that our vulnerabilities can connect us and free us from isolation.

Through this collaboration, photography becomes a material to touch, fold, and transform. What begins as observation turns into shared exploration – a conversation of perception, emotion, and spatial experience. Calm, tension, hope, and intervention coexist as part of an ongoing process.