Studying Andrej Pirrwitz’s (b. Dresden, 1963) photographs, we can never be entirely certain where he took them. Is the artist revisiting the rational industrial architecture of a past era of maximum production? Or is he already picturing the ruins of our own late-capitalist world? His works use time exposures to blur the line between recent history and contemporary reality. With a painter’s flair for composition—Pirrwitz studied painting—he displaces furniture, filing cabinets, and other leftovers at the desolate scenes that are his motifs. His shots exude a ghostly calm that is sharply at odds with our fast-paced present. The demise of a failed order or the long-desired dawn of a new age? That is in the eye of the beholder. With an essay by Christoph Tannert.