Studying in-medium hadron properties with HADES

HADES is a second generation experiment designed to study dielectron production in proton, pion, and heavy ion induced reactions at the GSI accelerator facility in Darmstadt. The physics programme of HADES is focused on in-medium properties of the light vector mesons. In this contribution we discuss relevance of dielectron spectroscopy to the problem of hadron mass origin. We present status of the HADES experiment, demonstrate its capability to identify rare dielectron signal and show first experimental results obtained from C+C reactions at 2 $A$GeV.